


John My Beloved

by Lynzee005



Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: Blow Jobs, Hamburg Era, M/M, Magic Realism, Masturbation, McLennon, Mild Blood, Minor Violence, Mutual Masturbation, Non-Graphic Violence, One Shot Collection, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Pre-Beatles, Recreational Drug Use, things get messy...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2020-05-12 01:39:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 33,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19218985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lynzee005/pseuds/Lynzee005
Summary: They've always loved each other, in their own way...





	1. Are We To Speak?

**Author's Note:**

> My first McLennon fic and I'm super nervous about sharing! I so hope you like it...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired a bit by the masturbation comments from last year. Was trying something a bit different than my usual style--something more stream-of-consciousness. Not sure if I love it yet or not but it's a thing and I'll see how I feel at the end of it all.

 

 

Paul has just restrung his guitar and they’re sitting in his room and it’s July so it’s hot outside, too hot to _be_ outside, but they have to open the window because they shared a tin of beans for lunch and Christ if that stuff doesn’t creep up on you, so now it’s as hot inside as out and John has taken off his shirt.

John, shirtless, is sitting next to Paul on Paul’s bed, and Paul doesn’t stare. In fact he trains his eyes to land anywhere but. Which is probably the reason John notices.

“Don’t worry, son,” John grins, looking at the narrow expanse of Paul’s chest, exposed by the four buttons that Paul has undone on his shirt. “Puberty’ll hit any day now. You’ll get yer first chest hair soon enough.”

Paul chuckles and blushes, brushes it off, pretends to tune his high E string. His fingers find the frets, his ear bent low over the body as he listens for discord and finds none; the B and E strings ring out in perfect harmonic waves. But Paul can’t stop yet because if he stops, he’ll start thinking, and the only thought in his mind is that _John’s shirt is balled up on my floor and John is shirtless and John is on my bed and he has no shirt on and..._

He gulps and twists the tuning knob a bit too far, hears the slight _ping...ping, ping, pingpingping_ right before the thing snaps clean and _thwacks_ John on the arm. John yelps, recoils. An angry red welt immediately forms on his pale skin.

“Fuck!”

"Shit, John,” Paul curses. “Shit. I’m sorry.”

John grasps his forearm and Paul throws his guitar to the side and bolts from the room to get ice from downstairs—instincts borne from being the son of a nurse. Five cubes wrapped in a tea towel, held in shaking hands as Paul bounds back up the stairs, two at a time. He offers the bundle to John, who presses it to his arm; the skin is broken in three places, tiny dots of blood standing up against the thin, swollen line.

“Shit.”

Paul catches himself staring again at John’s chest, at the way it expands at the sharp intake of breath as an ice cube falls out of the cloth and rolls down to land in his lap, a brief stopover before it drops to the floor beside his toe; the flinch in John’s left pectoral as he tightens his hold on the cloth in response. Paul’s hands fall limp at his side; his mouth goes dry.

“Worse things have happened, I s’pose,” John drawls, lifting the towel to take a peek—Paul sees more blood; he feels a bit sick.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats.

John turns his attention back to Paul. A bemused expression crosses his face as he lifts his eyes. “Besides, it seems like we’ve got bigger problems here now, anyway.”

Paul doesn’t grasp his meaning immediately, but as John’s eyes follow the deep-V created by the unbuttoned buttons of Paul’s shirt, down down down to just below his navel, then lower, to his belt buckle, and then just a bit lower…

Paul suddenly feels his erection and his heart sinks. He collapses to the bed, folding in on himself, drawing a knee up to his chest as he blushes. “Fuck.”

John teases, laughs. “What’s got you excited, Paulie?”

“Nothing.”

He peeks between Paul’s legs. Laughs again. “Doesn’t _look_ like nothing.”

“Fuck off.”

They stare at each other for a brief moment. The vague summer hiss outside and the whirr of the neighbour’s push lawn mower and are the only sounds to reach their ears. A twitching smile quirks the corner of John’s mouth.

"What’re you gonna do about it then?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, you’ve gotta do _something_.”

Paul closes his eyes and leans his head against the wall behind him. _Later, maybe. When you’re gone and I’m alone and it’s dark out and the house is asleep and—_

“Don’t let _me_ stop you.”

Paul wants to join the ice cubes melting into the floorboards. “Oh you’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” he whines, because John’s attention is so _obvious_ now and this is the worst fucking thing, and _Christ, he’s gonna tell the others, and then they’ll think I’m queer, that I’ve got the hots for Lennon_ …

John Lennon, beside him, shirtless, in his bed, bleeding, staring.

“Not half as much as you’d be if you just took it out and finished it off,” John says, and then says nothing more, just sits there, silent as the grave, eyes jumpy. Nervous. He licks his lips and _fuck_ his lower lip glistens and Paul feels dizzy and  _fuck_ this is torture  _fuck fuck fuck_.

John takes a breath. “If it’ll make you feel better…”

He trails off, a beat, but before Paul can reply, John’s hands are on Paul’s hips and he’s thumbing down the waistband of Paul’s trousers, and there are ice cubes falling everywhere, shockingly cold against summer-fevered skin and Paul's heart thrums in his ears as his self-preservation instincts kick in.

“Hey!” Paul cries, pushing (limply, fakely, uninspiringly) with one hand against his bandmate’s shoulder, but John’s on top and he weighs more and Paul loses the battle as soon as calloused fingers (knowingly, expertly, deliriously) encircle him, and it's not like it was wholly unexpected and it's definitely not unwanted, but they both halt, take stock,  _is this really happening?_

Heat pools in the root belowbeneathwithin John’s hand. Paul holds his breath. John adjusts his grip, takes a breath, loosens his fingers, slides his hand down, down, a half an inch. Paul, hips lift, a half thrust, instinctual, enough to notice. He closes his eyes.

When he opens them, John is looking down at him. His hand is still; Paul twitches against his palm. He feels he could die. John could be the one to kill him, and Paul would fucking welcome it, this end, right here, because it's  _John_ and he's looking down at him and... 

And then _he_ _does it_.

Kills him.

"So what'll it be then, Macca?" 

Paul's mouth hangs agape and he's only just realized it, but closing it feels like acknowledging that he's not in control of this situation, which he isn't, but fuck if he's going to admit it, so he keeps it open, halfways open, and blinks up at John. Morse code, maybe, but then John can't see him anyway. 

“Finish yourself off.”

He lets go, and Paul’s turgid cock falls back against his lower belly with a heavy _slap._

Of course Paul does what he’s told, without questioning, because when John tells you to do something you do what you're told, without questioning: he reaches between them, takes hold, pumps his fist once, twice, and John watches as, with a quiet groan, Paul empties himself against his own stomach.

Time picks up where it left off. Summer hisses on outside the window. Downstairs, the door slams; brother Mike is home. John retrieves the melted ice-dampened cloth from beside them and tosses it to Paul as he pushes himself back onto the mattress.

“There,” he tells him, and Paul notices that John is looking at him intently, too intently, eyes wide and pupils blown, and Paul hasn't seen that look before, not on a man's face, and he wonders if he looks the same to John, because the way John looks is how Paul feels, and there's comfort in knowing that they might be in the same place here, because that means this was... 

Well what was it?

“Wasn’t so bad?” John says, answering Paul's question.

Paul looks away, cleans himself up, careful of the cold dampness in the cloth, of the spots of John’s blood staining the fabric. John leans against the wall and takes up Paul’s guitar, the broken string bouncing lazily in the July swelter of this room as Paul pulls up his trousers and tucks himself away.


	2. I Read You For Some Kind of Poem

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set in Hamburg during their tenure at the Top Ten Club, spring 1961. Inspired loosely by the event chronicled in Anthology, in which John returned to their room one night to find Paul with a woman and violently cut up her clothes with a pair of scissors.

 

 

It’s midnight or later, probably later— _Definitely later; you didn't get offstage until two-thirty_...—and Paul is losing hope. As far as fights with John go, this one is a doozy. It’s the same fight they’ve been having for weeks, except it’s different this time because this time Paul actually brawled with Stu, right up there on stage in front of everyone, about everything and nothing ( _He's a shite bass player and he's only in it for Astrid and he should have stuck to painting and why does he get all your time and attention, I'm right fuckin' here, Johnny, I'm right here!_ ) and the whole thing is fucking mess now, but Stu has both feet out the door and Paul is probably, finally, getting what he wants, except _fuck, this means I have to play bass now, doesn’t it?_ and John is madder than hell and nothing is going right so his luck is bound to turn, eventually, right?

“Eventually” is—so far—three days and three nights of silent treatment. Paul can’t stand it. So in between sets that night, the night that's now passing into morning as he lays there beneath the chipped and peeling ceiling and waits for John to come home, he nicks a cocktail napkin from the bar and scribbles on it with a pen produced from the cleavage of some big-titted barfly and sticks it into John’s guitar case.

 

_“I’m sorry. Talk to me. Please.”_

Then he waits.

From the light in the window, it's nearly five am when John finally returns to their hovel, a bird on each arm, drunkenly trying to be quiet until he realizes it’s only Paul in the room—Pete’s at the bar downstairs with George coming off the Prellies and Stu is with Astrid _of bloody fucking course Stu's with Astrid_ —so he stops caring and starts yelling. “Brought one for you and one for me,” he slurs, shrugging the short one off his arm and towards Paul’s narrow bed, where Paul pretends to be asleep. The giggling girl falls to the floor next to Paul's lower bunk and her hands are on his underpants and soon her lips are all around him and in the half light he can see John standing by the wall, the girl on her knees in front of him, his hand on the back of her head, but he’s staring at Paul. He’s staring at Paul and Paul stares back and for a moment the room is silent except for the girls murmuring purrs and the sounds of soft, sloppy blowjobs, and eventually it’s too much, he can't do two things at once, and Paul is the first one to break away, leaning his head back into the pillow because _Damn if it doesn’t feel ahh-_

The girl with his cock in her mouth shrieks as she’s pulled off him, thrown back on her ass, and Paul winces as teeth rake and suction _pops!_ and he cries out as much in shock as because he was so close to finishing and this half-orgasm is gonna hurt if he doesn’t do something about it and quick. But his attention is pulled away like the _fraulein_ was because, in spite of his throbbing dick, he's mesmerized by John as he stumbles around in the dark with his pants around his ankles and takes one girl and then the other by the arm and shows them both the door. And they protest, loudly, first about wanting to fuck them and then about wanting to get paid whether they fuck or not, but John didn’t have any money and neither did Paul, not really, so that was never going to happen, and now Paul is slightly worried about the girls’ pimp because they’re on the other side are shouting obscenities at them— _Du Hurensohn! Fick dich ins Knie! Schwanzlutscher!_ —which are some of the few German words that they both understand, so they’re going to tell their pimp, _of course_ they are.

But Paul doesn’t get a chance to do much translating or protesting or worrying of his own because before he knows it, John is straddling him on the narrow bed, leaning over to avoid hitting his head on the bottom of the top bunk, angled over Paul's suddenly stiffened body.

“I got yer note.”

_This is how you tell me?_ Paul wants to ask, but he doesn’t, because John is in his lap and his hands are on his chest and in his hair and Paul’s still got his dick out and now so does John and—

“What the fuck, John?” is what he says instead.

They’re alone in the room and the whores on the other side of the door are gone and they’re both breathing hard and heavy and it smells like cheap booze and sweat and it’s _intoxicating_ to once again be taken by surprise, and Paul realizes he’s harder than he was before.

_Curious, that._

No, not so curious. It’s John, after all.

“What the fuck, Paul?”

John’s hands are on Paul’s hips, pushing him into the thin mattress, holding him fast under the weight (obviously) of his body and (evidently) of his desire, which is sitting heavily, stiffly, thickly swollen next to his own, and Paul realizes that _Our dicks are touching_ but he doesn’t feel weird about it; quite the opposite.

It’s been two—two? maybe three—years since the last time they got this close and nothing came of it but damn if it didn’t fuel a dozen wank sessions— _Fuck, Paul, you’re lyin’ to yourself now, because you think about it every time_ —a _dozen_ dozen, maybe— _That’s better…_ —but never in all that time did he actually believe that the things he’d imagined would come to fruition, and yet _here they are_ , and John’s hands are on Paul’s hips, and he’s pushing him through the mattress now, and Paul feels bold.

He lifts his hand a little, tests the waters—because the last thing he wants is to provoke John’s anger if Paul had read this whole thing wrong—and finds them calm as he walks his fingers across his own belly and into the gap between them, and takes John in hand. His fingers come away slick, and it’s the headiest thing, and Paul feels his own cock twitch achingly as he begins to move his hand—up, down, gentle squeeze, little twist, thumb brushing the sensitive underside, lingering in the leak from his tip—the way he likes to move, hoping like hell it’s the way John likes it too. He feels suddenly mature, grown up in a way that he never was before, not after his first lay, not after his first cigarette, not after his first paycheque, and he hopes that John—older John, Teddy Boy John, gruff and boisterous and chip-on-his-shoulder John—notices and approves, maybe even that he’s impressed, because nothing would make him happier than impressing John…

…but to Paul’s surprise, John leans down and kisses him then, and he's an absolute goner.

It’s nothing he can prepare himself for, because being kissed by John is like having his body thrown down a fucking flight of stairs, and how do you prepare for flight like that? It’s like he’s a kid again, gangly and awkward, hands pressed to the breasts of the first girl he ever made it with—she, older just like him, more experienced just like him, in the front parlour, no one else home; inexperienced rutting on the floor in front of the telly—but it’s also _not_ that, because John is hard and pushy and angled, and it’s awkward, and Paul doesn’t know what to do with his hands and he’s forgotten how tongues work and _Oh, god, what if I blow it right here?!_ and his mind swims laps while he takes stock of where his autonomic nervous system ought to be.

Paul is more than dimly aware that this is one of those First Times he should definitely not gloss over, and so he wants to commit it all to memory but he just doesn’t have the wherewithal. So he covers his sudden inexperience with enthusiasm, tilts his head to the side, seals himself against John, tries to find a way to graft what he knows about first times onto this moment so it’ll keep in deep storage. So now it's not the parlour in Forthlin Road but a chilly bedchamber off the Reeperbahn; the breasts are gone and it’s his friend(bandmate? brother? lover?)’s lean and taut chest that his hand finds; it’s not the girlish-on-the-cusp-of-womanly hips and thighs hugging his but the slim hips of the boy(man? does it matter?) _who can’t see you, ever, even when you’re a foot apart, and then only he lets you in on the secret of his glasses, and you love looking at him with his eyes framed in black and you’ve dreamed about him looking at you in a moment just like this but with those glasses on his face so he can see you, see what he does to you,_ and Paul has half a mind to stop him right then and go find John's fucking Buddy Holly spectacles so he can bring the fantasy to reality. But he doesn’t. Because John rolls them over in the narrow bedframe and John hits the wall beside them and shimmies beneath, on his back, and now Paul is on top and he spreads his thighs until he's kneeling above John, and John's hands are in his hair and pulling him down, crashing him him, and their teeth clash together and John barks a laugh—because this is the most ridiculous thing—right into the back of Paul’s throat and John starts canting his hips up, up, up and he grasps Paul in his calloused fingers and fuck if that’s just about all she wrote, folks.

Paul is anxious again, trying not to blow it, trying to be cool and coming up empty. But then he can taste cigarettes and booze on John’s tongue and beyond that there’s something else, something richer and darker. And it’s _John_. He’s tasting _John_. And it’s like coming home, only to the kind of home he's never experienced before, never known was right there in front of him the whole time. Nothing else matters. John is in his hand and in his mouth and all around him and it’s like nothing he could have ever imagined, and he knows because he’s tried.

There’s no roadmap for this; he’s blind as John is and maybe that’s a good thing, the way it’s supposed to be. 

There’s a pause, John slowing down, stopping, pulling back. Paul looks down at him, inches away, and worry twists his gut as he wonders if this is just John coming-to, realizing a mistake before he’s made it, sobering up to the sober reality that none of this can remotely happen _even while it’s happening_ , and Paul worries he’ll actually fucking cry if John says any of that out loud instead of just in his head…

But he doesn’t. “Hey,” John says, a little drunkenly, a little lazily, his voice deeper and hoarser—from singing all night? from something else?—as he lifts a hand and pushes Paul’s drooping quiff off his forehead.

“Hey.”

He thinks he sees John smile, and everything becomes easy again. “Macca…my Macca,” John whispers, and it's an odd thing for him to say, but Paul remembers thirty seconds ago when he tossed a bird out of their room in a jealous rage so maybe it's not that odd after all. John lifts his head off the pillow and their lips touch again, and it’s chaste this time, just chapped lips against his, but it’s intoxicating, maybe better than the last kiss, and as John’s hand begins to move, and Paul’s moves alongside, the world spins out of focus again, taking the last of Paul's fears with them.

It’s rough and inelegant—first times usually are—but they mirror one another, bumping knuckles, and soon there’s a rhythm—but there’s always been a rhythm, hasn’t there? This shouldn’t surprise anyone. They’re gulping down each other’s discarded breaths, leaning against one another, keening against each other, foreheads touching, sweat in their hair and their eyes and on their shoulders, hips rocking, faster and louder and arriving, finally—hard and hot and almost all at once and together, most importantly.

Paul tries to hold himself up but can’t, collapses, a heap of fatigue and relief, their mess squishing uncomfortably between them. For a moment Paul is annoyed, mildly; it’s tepid water from a cracked pipe in the shared bathroom to clean themselves, after all. But John’s free hand flexes in the small of Paul’s back and holds him there, so there’s nothing for it. He rests against John, letting him shoulder his useless, dead weight. The soft sweetness of John’s breath tickling the damp hair curling behind Paul’s ear relaxes him; he allows his hand to lift and caress the slender slope of John’s hip. For a long, long lingering moment, that's how they lay, and Paul thinks maybe John has fallen asleep, and  _wouldn't that be just like John; Cynthia's a lucky gal,_ but Paul can't be sure, and just then he thinks he hears him humming a tune; words dimly remembered, from moments around the family piano, his Dad and old Vaudeville songs, filter back to him. He closes his eyes, sings along, if only in his head.

_You are my honey honeysuckle, I am the bee..._

There's tenderness here where Paul had been certain none could find purchase, and it surprises him like John's kiss had done, and something flutters to life in his chest as he brushes John's hair back for him this time. He clears his throat and John stops humming.

"Should clean up?" It's barely a sentence; Paul's tongue feels thick in his mouth. He tries again. "Lads'll be back soon..."

John shakes his head. "Tired. Tomorrow."

Paul is pretty sure it is tomorrow, and so he says so— _I think it is tomorrow_ —and John cricks his neck to look out the window and nods, maybe approvingly, maybe just in acknowledgment.

"Whatever it is, it's Future John and Future Paul's problem," John says, but to appease Paul in that moment, he takes the starchy bedsheet and swipes himself clean, and Paul laughs a little, does the same, feels bad for the lady looking after them who has to clean the bedlinens.

"There," John says. Then he pulls Paul closer to him. "Sleep."

“You're not still mad at me?” he asks, cautious footing, aware that he’s strapped himself to a powder keg now. "About Stu?"

"I was never mad," John chuckles.

Paul lifts his head, utterly aghast. "You didn't talk to me for three days!"

Another laugh, a little softer this time. "That was your pride's doing, son, not mine."

Paul feels a fool. He lets his head drop to the pillow beside John's.

"So you're _not_ mad?"

John turns his head slightly as if to see Paul by the light in the window, but of course his eyes are shit and Paul knows he can't see a thing, and this time it makes Paul smile.

“Couldn’t be happier," he says. "Now fucking go to sleep..."

_Couldn’t be happier._

Paul sighs and John turns back and they're crammed into three feet of bunk space like boys at summer camp, and he keeps his lips pressed to John's temple, comfortable in the knowledge that this First Time is not going anywhere, that it'll keep just fine on its own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The image up top in this this chapter is a cropped and edited version of Astrid Kirchherr's original photo from 1960 of The Beatles at the Hamburg funfair.


	3. I Am A Man With A Heart That Offends

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set in July, 1963 during The Beatles week-long stint in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset.

 

 

It’s morning but not quite morning—half morning, when the sky is still dark but the shapes beneath it are moving and coming into view, waking up, an hour before the sun actually rises, and John is next to him in bed—decidedly _not_ rising, not yet—but Paul is awake. Because Paul hasn’t slept. Paul is awake and warm-damp from the shower he’s just finished and he’s shifting his eyes between John and the wall behind John, playing with the depth of focus in his own vision, never able to get the two to sharpen at the same time.

_Something poetic about that_. 

Two Johns, one in focus, one unfocused. The one with the wife and the baby, who chases skirts on the road and drinks and curses and sings winking love songs he maybe believes in but just as likely doesn’t, because John believes in nothing; and the one who closes hotel room doors and asks if he can touch you and then _does it,_ whose kisses leave bruises you have to hide and who talks in his sleep when he finally sleeps, beside you, on you, as close to you as he can get to you.

The John who _needs_ you like air and the John who doesn’t.

Can’t square the two. Paul never could.

It’s been months since his trip to Barcelona with Brian and weeks since the first time they tried to be together the way that men can be together, and _that’s_ a mouthful that neither of them know what to do with, since neither of them even have words for it, none that aren’t crass anyway. All Paul knows is that he was jealous that John was with Brian, however briefly, however that happened—John won’t talk about it—but that now John is in his bed and they’re in a hotel in Somerset and _It_ , whatever they want to call _It_ , has happened. And maybe it’s because of Brian, or in spite of him, and maybe Paul ought to be jealous, but he can’t be because Spain turned John into the (lover? boyfriend? What’s the use—they can’t define any of this, so why try?) Paul had always wanted him to be and never knew he could have, so how can he complain.

Paul shifts a little, adjusting his weight and the blankets on top of them both, and feels a tight tenderness. A dull fire, knotted deep and wound tight, tugging hotly at his core. He’s spent but throbbing, heavily desirous; he could go again, if only John were to wake up…

Paul still has women—women in his bed, women in dressing rooms, women in cars, women wherever he can have them; Paul will always love women—because that's what boys do, they pick up birds, but there's nothing new and no firsts to be had there anymore. So many of his firsts in the last few years had been with John and that is something he is going to have to get used to. Because John is nothing like the girls he’s usually with.

No. _Girls_ , with their soft curves and smooth skin and long hair, whispering voices, are nothing like _John_. 

Maybe _that's_ the way it goes; John is the standard now, the bar against which everyone else is measured, and Paul has surprisingly few problems with that equation.

“You’re doin’ that thing again, Macca,” John drawls and Paul remembers himself.

“What thing?”

“Where you watch me sleep. Knock it off.”

Paul smiles and hunkers down into the pillow. “I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept yet at all.”

John opens one eye. “Fuck,” he says. “I could sleep for days.” He waits a beat. “You clean up nice, Macca,” he says, lazily lifting his finger to flick a strand of wet hair from Paul’s forehead, and of course with how dark it is and John’s shit eyesight besides, he misses and flicks Paul right above the eye. “Whoops.” But then he does it again, on purpose, and Paul swats his hand away with a soft yelp.

“How do you feel?” Paul changes the subject.

“Sore,” John says. “The good kind though.”

“There’s a _good_ kind?”

John goes softly silent and purrs something quiet, but not words, just sounds; Paul goes a bit weak.

Then John breathes. “The kind of sore that reminds me you were there. The good kind.”

Paul’s heart surges and he reaches a hand up from between them, beneath the blankets, and trails a finger along along John’s from knuckle to fingertip. He can’t tell if John is smiling or not but in his mind’s eye he pictures him happy, as happy as he is, because that’s how it ought to be when everything is right, and it _is_ right. There’s nothing _wrong_ about any of this.

_Nothing wrong with your best friend inviting himself into your hotel room._

_Nothing wrong with kissing each other breathless against the door the second it closes._  

_Nothing wrong with "What'll it be Macca?" hummed against your throat._

_Nothing wrong with his hands removing your shirt, or yours removing his._

_Nothing wrong with grasping each other as if you are each the other’s life raft_. (Even though that’s what it feels like most of the time, life rafts in a sea of concerts and promotions and fans and screaming and crashing together when it’s finally quiet).

_Nothing wrong with burying your fingers within him, and him burying his face into the pillows, and you taking him—slowly, gently, like all the times before, but further than before this time, deeper—deeper—harder… faster… nothing wrong with him coming in your closed fist, reached around his ribcage, him all elbows and knees in front of you and whimpering his ecstasy into his arm, because he felt you come first…_

Paul’s erection is painfully obvious.

“I’d like to try it the other way,” he offers quietly, because it’s all he’s been thinking about—how it would feel to kneel in front of John, to be entirely filled by him, if they’re gonna do this thing, might as well really do it, yeah?—and he strokes the back of John’s hand, again, hoping that the message is clear because more words aren’t coming. “You know… someday.”

John grows quiet, still, contemplative. “Yer too loud, Paulie,” John teases, but there’s no mirth behind his words, and Paul feels the coldness hit him _like an ice cube falling from a tea towel against summererotic flushed skin_ , he remembers, and his heart sinks.

Still, he plays along because a game with John is better than nothing. “I could learn,” he whispers, pressing his lips to two of John’s fingertips, drawing one between his lips _just-so_ , and even in the darkness he knows that John’s eyes have pooled and his lips have parted because they’ve been dancing this dance long enough for him to know without needing to see. They’re inches apart and Paul feels John’s heartbeat in his fingertips, pressed to his tongue, and it’s racing in time with his own because _rhythm, there’s always been a rhythm_.

“Teach me?” he whisperbegs. “Shut me up, Johnny.”

John pushes his fingers into Paul’s mouth and Paul groans but quietly, and John replaces his fingers with his tongue and Paul groans, a bit less quietly, and then John descends below the covers and takes Paul into his mouth and even though that’s not really what Paul had in mind, he’s eager nonetheless. He throws his head back against the pillows and fists the blankets and gasps and tries to keep quiet but then fails that, spectacularly, and John teases, tortures, stops until Paul is quiet.

John picks up again, and Paul mumbles “Ffffuck—” and John stops, again, until Paul is quiet.

And then Paul _gets it, oh, fuck you John, you’re such a bastard_ and he bites the heel of his hand instead, and it doesn’t work perfectly, but throaty growls are better than yelps and, you know, _actual words_ being shouted within paper thin walls of a seaside resort town hotel room, with their brothers in the rooms next door and their manager across the hall.

And it keeps John going, which is all that matters.

Because John’s mouth is soft and warm and the things he does— _fuck_ , the things he’s capable of doing, _where did he learn how to do these things?_ —are things that Paul's never imagined, never thought possible, not from the girls he’s been with, even the German ones. Paul realizes he’s never going to be able to stay quiet, not when John is pulling up on him and swirling his tongue and descending again, further, deeper, and Paul can’t help but thrust, and John clamps his hand down on his hip to stop him and _Christ Almighty_ …

“John—I’m gonna… god, John—”

And then he does, and John slows up, slows down, doesn’t leave until he’s taken every last bit of Paul with him, and Paul shudders and shuts his eyes and rubs his hand, because his teeth are gonna leave a bruise, he can feel that for sure, but he doesn’t really mind; it was worth it.  

John doesn’t crawl back up to rejoin Paul, though; he swings his legs off the bed, and Paul is only aware of that fact when he hears John’s feet hit the floor beside him. And he’s momentarily crushed, because he wants to return the favour or at least see if he could, anyway, but at the very least this post-climax afterglow has got him emotionally mixed up a little bit, it always does, and all he wants is just a _moment_ , a single solitary _moment_ , with John’s head on his chest or Paul’s head on John’s chest or _whatever_ , just _fucking hold me a little, Lennon_ , but—

“You don’t need to go—” 

“What if someone sees?” he asks from his perch on the edge of the bed, and maybe he hears how hard his voice has become because he lets go of a little chuckle. “Or hears?”

He’s teasing but Paul doesn’t want to play anymore. _So what?_ Paul wants to ask, but doesn’t, because… well, he knows the answer.

Still.  

“John, stay. Please.”

John scavenges for clothes, left in a trail from the door to the bed, and Paul can feel the flinty silence growing between them, and he doesn't like it. Eventually, John sits back down again on the edge of the bed, and with sharp movements he sticks his legs into his trousers.

“I’m not a queer, you know,” he mumbles, as if it were a question he’d been asked/was asking in his own mind, and _that_ hurts, because now it _does_ feel wrong, and tawdry, and there’s an ache in Paul's chest now to accompany the one in his belly…

“I never said you were," Paul replies, and he accompanies it with a hand reached over to John's bare forearm. 

_That_  slows John. He stops, fidgets with the dress shirt looped over his forearm as a pretense to touch Paul's hand, and then there they are, holding hands, and Paul wants to shake him because he's so happy and John could be, too, if only... 

John leans over, covers Paul with his body, kisses Paul’s bare shoulder, the side of his neck, the base of his throat, then presses his lips to cup of Paul's ear.

“ _Do you want to know a secret_?” he whispers, breathless singing, and Paul sighs and closes his eyes and nods _Yes…_ as his hands roam the landscape of John's body, the flat expanse of his lower back, the softness in his hips, so soft Paul can hardly stand it, and John hums.

“ _I’m in love with you…_ ”

There it is. Paul soars. 

John kisses Paul’s earlobe. “I’ll see you at breakfast, Macca.”

He’s gone before Paul can reply.

_Not a queer._

_I’m in love with you._

Two Johns, Paul thinks as the latch on the door closes and his love disappears into the hallway beyond.

Two Johns.

One who needs you like air.

And the other…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The image up top in this this chapter is a cropped and edited version of an original photo by Mike McCartney of John and Paul writing together in the front room in Forthlin Road.


	4. Your Beautiful Face

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set during their final tour, summer 1966, the day after the cherry bomb incident that convinced them they should stop touring.

 

It’s pouring rain, Biblical rain, and there’s no cover for the stage so that's the crisis of the hour, another one which Paul doesn't have the energy to deal with right now. He wants a kip, anywhere, just twenty minutes to recharge, because between Brian and the promoter and John and “Bigger than Jesus” and the fans and the goddamn fucking rain, it feels like Jericho is readying to crumble down around him and he’s doing everything he can to hold it together with his bare hands and so _twenty minutes, all I want is twenty fucking minutes_ is the mantra. _Twenty fucking minutes_.

He finds a sofa near a coffee vending machine in a basement corridor of the stadium. It smells like stale cigarettes and the once yellow corduroy fabric is greying and frayed where centuries of sitting asses have worn it raw. But it’s moderately soft and this is a quiet hallway, so he sits down, lays down, head down. Counts to ten. Makes it to three.

Sleeping has never felt so good.

Eventually he’s awoken—it doesn’t matter why, or how long he slept, the important fact being that Paul is awoken before he wanted to be. So Paul wakes up and he’s pissed and he says so, out loud—"Jesus Christ, just twenty fuckin' minutes!"—without realizing at first that it was John who woke him, and he lets loose a string of quiet profanities as he rubs his bleary eyes and fights the swelling crush of disappointment rising in his chest.

But Paul’s eyes adjust to the bright light and he resists the urge to sit up but only for a moment, because he turns his head to the side and sees John crouched on the floor beside the coffee vending machine, knees apart, elbows perched, head in his hands. And Paul forgets himself, his anger, his need. Because it’s John.

And for John: anything.

“‘Ey?” Paul croaks, and John doesn’t move, so Paul says it again—"'Ey, John?"—getting up this time, coming to crouch beside him. And then he realizes that John is shaking. He’s shaking so hard Paul can see it. He puts a hand on John’s, trying to steady him, but all it does is shake Paul’s arm instead.

“I can’t go out there.”

“Where?”

John’s voice is half-pitched and whisper thin. “I wish I’d never said what I said.”

Paul sinks back on his backside and crosses his legs in front of him. “It’ll blow over.”

But John isn't placated, and when he looks up at Paul, his eyes are blown wide in fear and glassy like he's never seen them, not even on the worst of the drug trips he's taken, and Paul worries his hand along John's shin, thinking it a good thing to do. 

"John, love," Paul says. "You're okay. Everything is okay."

“Last night—”

_Oh_ , Paul sinks into memory.  _Of course_. The firecracker, thrown on stage or just off stage, or somewhere near enough to feel that the horrible “pop!” as it went off—that had to rank up there with the most frightening moments in his life, right next to the Philippines, and  _Fuck, that was only a few weeks ago_ , and he realizes what a terrible summer it's been.

Paul puts more pressure beneath his palm, hoping the sensation of his hand on John's leg will bring him back to reality from wherever it is he's gone to, but John is long gone. "John, we're okay. Everything is okay. Nothin' is gonna happen tonight, I promise—"

"You can't promise that," John says. "When you're standin' next to me and it's _me_ they fuckin' hate, you can't promise that it'll be okay..."

It occurs to Paul then that what he remembers and what John remembers might be two different things, and he steps aside for a moment, sets his ego down and imagines standing at the mic where John stands, remembers the way the sound ricocheted, echoed, after the initial blast, how he'd thought maybe it was the start of a volley; did John think that too? DId he see what was happening? Because in Paul's mind's eye he sees George, and there’s Ringo, and he remembers the way John's eyes had met his own as he continued to sing but with a look on his face as if to ask _Is it you?_ —Paul imagines, he sees, he's reliving the moment his brotherslooked at each other and then at him, and the sickening realization that they each thought the other had been shot returns like it's _happening now_. But if he's John—and he lets his mind go there too, putting himself in John's shoes, John who said a stupid thing he's been paying for for too long—then he maybe doesn't see, maybe he feels it, maybe he only hears it, and  _that's_ scarier. Scarier because you're incapacitated and scarier because you feel, deep down, that it's your fault, and you're not hurt, you're not bleeding, but someone else might be, and it would be  _your fault_...

For a brief moment he understands something he didn't before, and for not-the-first-time Paul wonders if maybe the others are right and touring is not worth it.

It’s not worth _this_ , Paul knows that for sure, as he squeezes John’s hand and repositions himself to offer better comfort, crooking one leg beneath John's, reaching an arm over John's, snugging up, shielding him...

The coffee machine buzzes to life; it startles them both, but the mechanical _clank_ that follows is what makes John jump, and Paul catches the look in his friend(bandmate? brother? lover? still no satisfactory definition, _you should stop doing that_ )’s darkening eyes, and for the first time since that cop killed John’s mother, Paul decides that it’s probably okay to hold John’s hand because he looks like he’s about to cry and Paul won’t judge him if he does and John needs to know that.

Their hands—hands that have played, hands that have held chords, hands that have held _each other_ —join and their fingers interlace and Paul can feel John’s heartbeat in the lines of his fingerprints and it’s _fast_ like he can’t even tell you. Paul’s thumb strokes, reassures. Paul’s grip squeezes, reassures. But John hitches a sob and his chest heaves and his foot taps and Paul decides to take a page from Shakespeare and _let lips do what hands do_ and he leans in and tilts John’s chin and catches him there with a kiss.

They don’t kiss in public and this, this is a hallway without doors in the belly of a stadium in CincinnatiClevelandMemphisSt. Louis or wherever and that’s about as public as it could get short of sticking their tongues down each other’s throats _up there_ on stage in front of umpteen-thousand screaming girls and _boy wouldn't that impress the Klan_. But John’s mouth is a flower and Paul is the sun and in this moment it’s open and warm and inviting and there’s nothing to do but _tilt your head and deepen the seal and shift your bodies so as much of you is touching as much of him as possible,_ and so what if they're in a cramped corner of a dirty basement corridor beside a coffee vending machine in a St. Cinciclevephis concert venue?

That John allows this is not the biggest surprise. No, that’s when John breaks, breaks down, breaks apart into a million beautiful pieces, shards of fragile glass splintering out at Paul’s feet, and Paul wants nothing more than to collect each piece and put him back together or, _No, collect each fractal—because each piece is as precious as the whole it might as well be the whole—and sew them into the lining of jacket, secret pockets for his secret love—no, better yet, place him beneath my skin, cut me open and keep him close, we'll live forever and he'll always be safe, safe with me_...

He collapses with sobs that come up from places long buried and it’s suddenly up to Paul to shoulder the weight of a nearly twenty-six year old man and their secret eight-year long relationship and a quote out of context traveling at the speed of sound with the momentum of a Bible belt bonfire and a fear so palpable that something will happen—not to him, but to  _them_ —because of it all. And Paul struggles.

But, for John: anything.

“I hate crying,” John admits finally, his sobs subsiding.

“‘S okay.”

John’s hands are his lap and he’s sniffling and rubbing his nose on Paul’s shirt and Paul is annoyed but only a little, because… John. But when John pulls back and looks Paul in the eye and asks—“It’s gonna be okay?”—that’s when Paul really feels it: all that love he’s always had, that tells him it’s okay for John to get snot on your shirt, because. Just fucking because.

“‘Course it is,” Paul chokes.

And John is dead serious when he looks up at Paul, eyes still wet and skittering, and his mouth drops open as he shakes his head, as if to say  _I don't believe you_.

And Paul doesn't believe himself, either, not really, not anymore. So he re-takes John's hand, holds him close. 

"Okay," he says with a nod. "Okay. We stop then."

"Stop?"

"Touring."

And that does it. John won’t say it, not right now and not like this. But it’s the same thing as saying it, when he smiles and softens and his eyes relax and his thumb begins to move in small circles against the heel of Paul's hand.

There are so many ways of saying I Love You and this is one of his.

George’s voice finds them before his eyes do and so there’s time to disentangle, scoot apart a modest, decorous few inches, and act naturally, and George is none-the-wiser as he rounds the corner and says “The show’s cancelled” because the rain is too much and Mal got electrocuted and _fuckin’ promoter, couldabeen killed, Brian's livid, but we're goin' back to the hotel, packing it up now_. Paul just nods, relieved, even though it means they have to stay in town and perform the show tomorrow when they should be on a plane to the next stop. But that’s Brian’s logistical nightmare, not his.

_His_ logistical nightmare is sitting beside him, and it’s pressing hard against the zipper fly of his trousers, and it’s thinking about going back to the hotel early and _not_ going to sleep, and it’s a glance across the Holy Spirit space between his shoulder and John’s as if to say _You need me and I’ll be there for you, darling, you know I will be…_

And John returns the glance, a mutual understanding, and it’s necessarily unspoken but that’s how so much of their communication is done these days, in glances and flicks of an eyebrow and maybe the touch of a hand in the small of his back before a press conference or getting off a plane, and it’s enough—it  _has_ to be enough—until they can be alone together, until they can consume each other in private again and again and again... 

George disappears the way he came, and John composes himself until they can’t hear George’s footfalls on the concrete floor, and then he crashes his lips against the soft skin of Paul’s neck, licks and suckles, a preview of what’s to come, evidently, which makes Paul's heart soar because _he was thinking the same thing as me_.

That shouldn't surprise him anymore, but it always does.

“Yer mad,” Paul keens.

John pulls away. “Yer welcome.”

And Paul is glad he didn’t get his twenty fucking minutes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Photo credit: Unknown (though I would love to credit it, so if you know the who/when/where of this image, let me know!)


	5. Go Follow Your Gem

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set on the night that John accidentally took LSD in the studio during the Pepper recordings and Paul took him home and then took acid with him. It was the first time they did it together. I remember an interview (though I can't find it now, of course) in which someone said that John was so out of it and was constantly asking "Is it alright?", so that finds its way into this scene as well.

 

It’s late and the sky is clear and there are a billion stars up there but Paul can only look at John, thankfully sitting alone in the center of the roof and not teetering on the parapet or already fallen to the carpark below the way he’d been worried about, and the relief nearly craters his stomach and drops him to his knees, and beside him he hears George (Harrison, that is) exhale audibly as they realize fully what they’ve avoided.

“Is it all right?” John whispers. 

“It’s all right, John,” Paul says. “Help me get him up?”

They labour to move him because John is deadweight between them, but they manage to maneuver him out of the air up there and into the stairwell and down to the studio level eventually and George (Martin, that is) is half-angry, half-worried, like any dad would be, and Paul “Yessir, nossirs” his way to ending the session, because John is out of his gourd and they can’t record like that anyway and everyone knows it.

It falls to Paul to take John home. 

“Do whatever it is you do,” is what bandmate George says to Paul, and there’s no hint of judgment or sarcasm or  _ anything _ in his voice, just the quiet respect of a man who has known for years and is now telling him that  _ Oh that secret you’ve been hiding? I know, and it’s okay, just get yourselves home safely _ , which is what Paul does.

He takes John home. 

Home in this case is his home, Paul’s, spitting distance from the front steps of the studio, and he drives past the gatebirds and unfastens his own seatbelt and then reaches over to help John and John pets his hair. And Paul smiles, sadly, because it’s tender, yes, but patronizing, and John isn’t in any shape to be patronizing right now, not when he can’t tell his arse from a hole in the ground. All the same, he helps John inside and John can only just barely manage, talking about the beauty in the mundanity around him and narrating it to Paul as they walk, and this is how Paul learns that, to John, the stars are pearls and the air is silk and the rocks beneath his feet are gemstones and if only he could reach out and touch them— 

Paul doesn’t want to trip, has never dropped acid with one of the guys before, but he wants—so badly—to experience what John is experiencing. Because… isn’t that what he’s  _ always  _ wanted? To see the world through John’s granny glasses?  

And of course the answer is a breathless  _ Yes _ so when he gets John settled inside and comfortable, he does it, almost without thinking. 

“Is it all right?” John asks again an hour, a minute, however long a time later. 

“It’s all right, John,” Paul says, as the world slides into prismatic Kodachrome. 

Hours pass and they’re lying on the grass in the garden, blanketed shivering sweating bodies shoulder to shoulder, eyes heavenward, and Paul is looking for pearls in the stars but that’s not what he sees; he sees water droplets, condensation on the ceiling of the world. Words careen through Paul’s violent mind and the one that sticks is  _ crestfallen  _ and he thinks he says it out loud because he watches as his breath-turned-vaporous rises, speech-bubbling, disappearing from view like so many words unspoken and he feels the dry grass needling his skin through his shirt and he wants to cry thinking that maybe what he sees will never be— _ can  _ never be—what John sees. He’s  _ crestfallen _ .  _ Despondent. Morose.  _

There’s a pause in his heartbeat, a moment of clarity. He turns his head and the stars blur and the trees spin silent as John’s face comes into view, and Paul sees he’s looking back at him.

Because it’s late and the sky is clear and there are a billion stars in the sky but Paul can only look at John. 

And John, apparently, can only look at Paul. 

And that’s something to think about.

Paul lifts his hand, unconsciously, and examines it, moves it, flickers his fingers as if that were part of the question, because it doesn’t feel connected to him—his hand—in any way and he isn’t sure it really is his own hand until he feels John’s hand in his and looks up and sees blues and greens and rippling waves coming from his fingertips and realizes they’re  _ John’s  _ fingertips, and those fingers are threading through and between his and he’s squeezing and  _ he’s holding John’s hand under the stars _ .

“Is it  _ really _ alright?”

Even though his words sound faraway Paul can tell that John is there, really there, beside him; he’s sparkling and shining and Paul thinks it must be the acid but no, not necessarily, because hasn’t John always shone like the gemstones he claimed to see in Paul’s driveway? He shines and his colours sparkle up and away to join the waterdropletsky and suddenly, very suddenly, it’s terrifying. Because it was only m onths ago but also a lifetime ago that they'd stopped touring and come home and it had been a relief, sure, but it was also the first time since they were boys that they weren't performing together, up on stage together, sharing mics together, fitting their guitars together in front of hundreds and thousands of people. Paul didn't have to adjust John's tie anymore. John wasn't going to forget the words to their songs anymore. It was the end of something and it was sad and Paul realizes now, holding his hand as he is, that he's never properly thought about it, never accounted for it, this John-shaped hole in his life. And even though John is _rightthere_ , he's not. Not really. It’s never occurred to him that this distance, this far-away-ness, might everlast, that John might _not_ be there one day _at all_ , not there to paint his sky with his breath and his words and his presence, the simple fact of his existence. Paul understands—he sees it now—that John is drifting away and for the first time he can’t be sure he’ll keep up, and if that’s what the future holds then he wants no part of it.

“I don’t know,” is Paul’s answer, because he doesn’t.

John leans in and kisses Paul and their hands are still entwined and they’re all tongues and acid-tripped lips and it's clumsy and inelegant, and John asks him—“What’ll it be Macca?”—and then it’s “Let me love you, let me love you, let me love you” before Paul has a chance to answer, and Paul feels his words slip down his throat in the same way that he suddenly wants to be sliding down John’s throat, and he wonders if maybe he’s saying it back  _Let me love you, letmeloveyou,_  or if he’s just imagining it. 

Not that it matters; it's real either way.

“Right here?”

“Is it alright?”   


It’s downright romantic is what it is, and Paul suddenly doesn’t care if his neighbours see or hear. He’s got John and John wants him and at this moment there isn’t enough acid in the world to make him lose track of the fact that this moment is perfect. He lets him love him, beneath the pearls or water droplets or supernovae a million billion lightyears away, and it’s more than alright, it’s  _ perfection _ . There are rainbows shooting across the sky because John has his mouth on him and he's tipping over the edge of a climax that'll simply wreck him body and soul and he’s sure the shouts that erupt, the ones that taste like cocoa as they leave his mouth, are loud enough to wake the dead but he couldn’t care less; when it’s his turn to return the favour, he wants to do the same for John, and for the first time in their courtship, Paul makes John holler and it’s not because Paul wrote it in a lyric for John to sing or put a microphone in front of him to record it, it’s because he pulled it from him like boardwalk taffy, with his tongue and his lips and the heat of his mouth, and  _ that _ more than anything pleases Paul to no end.

When it’s all over and they lay there, still shivering but deeply sated, John is coming down from his drug-induced high and Paul is still breathing rarified air, and John gets quietly contemplative, and Paul struggles to hear him.

“I was born to love you,” John whispers.

At least that’s what Paul hears. Wants to hear, maybe. It’s a nice image, a throughline through time from the moment they first took breaths as infants under slate grey skies with a war exploding over their heads to  _ this moment _ beneath rippling pinpricked indigo in his back garden, and he imagines that  _ yes, when I was born, it was like souls touching souls _ and it’s like he can  _ remember  _ it, but that’s absurd, isn’t it? 

_ But then how do you explain meeting John and hearing John and playing with John and finishing John’s sentences and finishing John and letting John finish you over and over and over again like it’s the most natural thing in the world?  _ Paul thinks that, on some level, he had to have known… 

And then, as if on cue— _ How does he do that?— _ John takes a breath and asks: “Did you know that?”

His words bring him back to earth and he turns his face so he’s looking at John and he sees love in his laugh lines like lines in the pages of a book that they’ve been writing together for more years now than his vanity would care to remember but his heart, his heart remembers it all. 

“Know what?” he asks, acutely aware of his voice filling his mouth before they finally tumble out.

“That I was born to love you?” he answers.

Paul nods, satisfied that he guessed correctly, that he heard John the first time. “Yeah, I know that.”

“And were you born to love me too?”

Again Paul nods, and John leans down and kisses him deeply and it’s out of time, their kiss, like it’s happening now and then and everywhere all at once, and Paul doesn’t know where he ends and John begins, and he thinks _That’s what acid does to you_. 

But that’s what John does to you too, if you let him. 

Morning is moving along the eastern horizon and it’s John who finds his feet and drags a shivering Paul and himself and their clothes and the blanket into the house, and it’s been eight hours since Paul slipped the blotter paper onto his tongue but he’s not feeling the effects anymore and neither is John. But there’s something else settling against their heartbeats, palpable and powerful, more than the drugs, better than the drugs, at least as far as Paul is concerned. He’s not afraid of John leaving, not now, not after  _ born to love you _ . 

_ Born to love you _ .

Yes, that’s it. That’s it, exactly. 

They’re still coming down as they climb the stairs and Paul draws the curtains in his bedroom against the lightening firmament and drops to the bed beside John, bodies heavy, limbs akimbo, draped over each other and descending dreamlessly into well-earned slumber, together, really together, and it’s like they’ve always been like that, and maybe—Paul thinks—maybe they have.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Photo credit: Barrie Wentzell (1967); photo manipulations by me.


	6. I've Wasted My Throes On Your Head

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set during the May 1968 Apple Corps launch in New York, when John and Paul faced the press and launched The Beatles' new company to sometimes less-than-wonderful press reaction. Paul has said he didn't feel right during that trip, and he blamed drugs for it. They stayed with their lawyer, Nat Weiss, at his apartment on East 73rd Street. John was already involved with Yoko, as he had been since before the band went to Rishikesh earlier in the year, and Paul had met up with Linda again on this trip, where she gave him her phone number.

They’re fighting because _of course they’re fighting_ , it’s what they _do_ now, except they’re in a different time zone, that’s all. A different time zone and it’s their last night, and they’re alone at Nat’s place and the interviews are done and they’re going home tomorrow but Paul feels tingly anxious all over because that’s how he’s felt all day and he can’t shake it. He can’t shake it—this notion that John hates him now, still, always? maybe? probably?—and he’s frozen on the sofa and the reefer is in another bag but maybe it’s bad reefer and that’s the problem? but anyway he’s not getting up to get it because he’s paranoid and John is on the phone and he’s probably talking to _her_ and Paul is _pa-ra-noid_ and he can’t shake it. So he sucks the dry skin next to his thumbnail, clamps it between his teeth, chews and tears and spits.

“What’s crawled up yer skirt?”

“Nothing,” Paul says. _Not you, not for a long time_ is what he thinks. But he can’t say that.

John takes off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose and then he sighs and Paul feels guilty and loving and his instincts tell him _Go to him, help him, hold him_ because he hates to see John this defeated and it seems he’s always defeated these days. So he starts to push himself up from the couch where he’s been sitting breathing chewing on his thumbnail for he doesn’t know how long but at least as long as it’s taken to draw blood, he knows, because the metallic taste of it replaces the bitterness that’s been squatting on his tongue since they sat down in front of the media piranhas that afternoon and… 

“That presser was shit.”

It just tumbles out, and Paul doesn’t know why the filter is off, why he didn’t catch it, but of course it’s because he’s nervous for some godawful reason, and really the whole trip feels like a failure—they’re failing, it’s all fucking failed, the whole thing, The Beatles, everything. His vision pulses a bit around the edge and he forgets how to swallow and it takes effort to breathe, like his lungs don’t work anymore.

John replaces his glasses and peers down his nose at Paul. “Well it wasn’t my fuckin’ fault, that.”

Needlessly defensive, the both of them. Paul sucks the edge of his thumb; his brows spar in the middle of his forehead. “Oh, so it’s mine?”

“You hardly said a fuckin’ _word_ _!_ Left me to do all the talking, and I don’t have the first fuckin’ idea—”

Paul bounces his knee and chomps on his hangnail and imagines that if he keeps chewing he’ll get to the bone and that suddenly sounds very appealing, cannibalizing his own thumb, because at least he wouldn’t have to talk to John and focus on John and _be here with John, alone, in New-Fucking-York…_

His vision blurs again, pulses, dims; Paul sucks in a breath and then another as his hand starts to shake.

John barrels onward. “I don’t know the answers to their questions! Why are they askin’ us about that? Do I look like a business man? Fuck! That’s your fuckin’ area, or it was, or it _should’ve been_ Eppy’s, but he’s not here and _you’re_ not here, clearly, _you’re_ away with the fuckin’ fairies, makin’ googly eyes at that photographer—I know she gave you her number, Paul, I fuckin’ _know_ it—makes me crazy—”

Paul wants to ask him why it matters that he has Linda Eastman's phone number burning a hole in his trouser pocket when John can spend twenty minutes on the phone with Whatshername without second thought, why John is allowed to seek comfort in her arms or her voice but Paul is made to feel wrong for wanting the same fucking thing, and it’s just like that night in Hamburg _isn’t it John? Remember that? When you brought me a bird and couldn’t stand the sight of her sucking me off because you wanted to be the one to do it instead?_ and he _wants_ to say _all of this_ but he doesn’t, because John is yelling and his face is getting red and he can’t, because he can’t breathe, because he can’t breathe in… 

“I don’t feel well—”

John barely hears him at first but he sees the slump in Paul’s shoulder and maybe Paul’s face has gone ashen or maybe it’s the panic in his eyes but it’s something that John _sees_ and reacts to and all the anger is forgotten and he crosses the room, two and a half John-legged strides, and he’s at Paul’s side, crouching at his knees.

“Talk to me.”

But Paul can’t, because he _can’t_ , so John gets up, reaches up, and loosens Paul’s collar, his necktie, pulling it down and Paul leans his head back against the sofa cushion and his hand vibrates as he brings it to his face to hide his face, because he’s going to cry and it’s been years since Paul let John see him cry.

He gasps for air, feels his throat tightening, only now he doesn’t know if it’s because of the reasons he began with or because he’s losing control and it hits him that _it’s all the same, that’s what all of this is, you’re losing control of everything and there’s nothing you can do_ , and that’s a harsh truth he doesn’t want to face, and the tears start to fall and suddenly he doesn’t care that John is looking at him with those eyes that can’t see but see _everything_.

“I’m dying, John—I can’t breathe—I’m dyin’—” 

“Don’t be daft, Macca,” John chides, and Paul realizes that he’s sitting next to him on the sofa and holding his hand, and _when did that happen?_ “Just breathe with me. Breathe in, love.”

Paul does it, because when John tells you to do something, right, well, you know how it goes by now… but he also does it because he can hear John breathing in, and there’s that automatic response, that unconscious reaction, that wherever John goes, Paul goes. Oh, there are times when it goes the other way, sure. But on balance, it’s always been this way. John has a band; Paul joins the band. John experiments (sex, drugs, rock and roll); Paul experiments. 

John breathes; Paul breathes.

His lungs start working again, and Paul sighs, and John whispers “Good lad” and Paul’s tears are falling hot rivers now _Oh god oh god oh god…_ and John pushes Paul’s hair back off his forehead.

“You’re okay, Paul. Nothing’s gonna happen to you, not while you’re here with me.”

“But when you’re not here, what then?”

It’s as if John has never considered the possibility before. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says, and he’s a bit dumbfounded, Paul can hear it in his voice, and for some reason that makes Paul even more upset, like _can’t you fuckin’ understand this?_ and he squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head.

“ _But you are_ , John!” Paul cries, actually crying tears, and he can see that John is completely taken aback but there’s nothing for it, not now, so he keeps going. “You’ve got one foot out the door, have had for months. Ever since India—no, ever since Brian…”

John is stroking Paul’s face and looking at him like he’s heaven. It’s too much for Paul.

“I’m losing you, Johnny,” Paul says as his voice cracks and takes a sob with it. “I don’t know how to fuckin’ handle it.”

And there it is, that’s the reason. 

John is leaving him. 

That’s a fear he hasn’t let himself feel or articulate in years, but it’s been there the whole time, rumbling just beneath the surface, a low-grade fever that he didn’t even notice he had, but now that he’s said it, he sees it for what it is, which is a litany of symptoms of this fear he’s been holding on to ever since John first touched him— _No, since the first day you saw him, before you knew who he was, really, before there was talk of a band, when he was just this scruffy-looking Ted and you were a lad with a paper round..._  

Paul has a shit poker face when it comes to John, he knows this, but he can’t help but try and put on bravery where none exists. He clears his throat, shifts his head, tries to man up, but John’s got his thumb on Paul’s cheek and he’s stroking, stroking.

“Yer not, Paul,” he says, more clearly and firmly than he’s said anything before. “Yer not losin’ me…”

So Paul’s face crumples and he whimpers, and that’s all it takes for him to tip his hand and it’s all hearts—terrible poker face, he has, just terrible—but then no weapons of war left in the cards Paul is dealt, because that’s how Paul chooses to see the world most of the time, in shades of I Love Yous, and John sees it some other way, though Paul’s never been able to figure out how or what that way is, exactly, but it's some variation on the same theme, it _has_ to be, because otherwise this wouldn't be happening. But the point here is that John is seeing Paul for the first time in months because _of course he sees_ , and his hand is warm on Paul’s cheek and suddenly that’s all that matters.

“Where else would I go, Paul?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then don’t be daft.” Again, with the insults.

Paul frowns. “But you’ve got _her_ now,” he says.

John’s face hardens but slightly. “And who’s in yer bed back home? Jane? Francie?” 

Paul deserves it, he knows he does, so he doesn’t put up a fight. 

“Besides, she’s not you, and I suspect they’re not me,” he continues, and he’s fucking right, so Paul allows it. “So what the fuck are we doing here, son?”

And it’s a reasonable question, Paul knows that, but he’s still shaky and he’s exhausted, so exhausted, from trying to hold the world up for them both that when John’s hand whispers over Paul’s cheek, cupping his jaw, his thumb brushing Paul’s lower lip, Paul closes his eyes imagines a scenario in which he, you know, _doesn’t_ do that, stops holding the world, allows John to take over for a little while, because _isn’t it true that all the best moments have been when John takes over?_ But, right, it’s not _strictly_ true, because there are no hard and fast rules like that between the two of them.

But on balance… 

Right.

So Paul parts his lips and John coaxes his thumb over Paul’s bottom teeth, and Paul can’t help himself—he closes around John’s thumb, licking and sucking, and John’s eyes go liquid luminous in his pale face. And it _does things_ to Paul to see him like this, twists his insides, and he feels that familiar, aching tug that ran from his heart to his groin. 

He remembers the last time they’d been here—stealing a moment to themselves in the mountains of Rishikesh, under banyan trees in the middle of a rainstorm, soaking wet and alone together and at peace beneath the leaves and in each other’s arms—but that had been so long ago and Paul isn’t sure if he is reading it right but here they are, alone in Nat’s apartment, alone together and definitely _not_ at peace but what the fuck, maybe tonight? 

“Fuckin’ hell…” John whispers. “Christ, Macca… you look so good…”

Paul manages a small chuckle and pushes John’s thumb out. “Even when I’ve been weepin’ like a schoolgirl?”

“Especially then,” John says, and he sounds like he means it but Paul isn’t sure until he kisses the outer corner of Paul’s eye, taking away the wetness there, and Paul melts. John traces the outline of Paul’s lips with his thumb, and the whole time he whispers _Christ, Christ, Christ_ and Paul knows what he’s thinking because it’s what John always thinks when he fixates on Paul’s mouth, so Paul shudders through a chest-rattling breath and pushes himself up from the sofa, his heart still racing, and John leans back.

“So then,” John asks, and Paul knows what’s coming next, because it’s what John always asks— _Macca, what’ll it be then?_ —but he doesn’t this time, because Paul blurts it out first. 

“What do you want, Johnny?”

“You know what I want.”

It’s the easiest decision he’s ever made to say _Yes, I do_ …, and then John is laying on the sofa and Paul is attacking his belt buckle almost as soon as the words are gone from his lips, and he descends and takes John’s entire fullness, everything he has, into his mouth. 

“If all I have to do is ignore you for a few weeks to get a blowjob like this—”

Paul doesn’t like that idea and he grazes his teeth a little—just a little—along the top of John’s prick, and the older man yelps and fists a handful of Paul’s hair, holding him steady. Paul chokes; John lets go. The command of his person is so complete and he’s so helpless and it’s the most amazing thing he’s experienced in months and Paul thinks he’s going to finish right then and there and that’s _not_ what he wants, not after all of this—he wants it to last all night—so he pulls away.

“I want you, John,” he says.

“You _have_ me.”

“No. I want you to want me the way you want them,” he demands. “I want you to fuck me.” And his meaning is plainly evident and even if it pisses John off that this is how it’s being referred to, he nods and pushes Paul off of him, stands up, calves the coffee table out of the way, and Paul understands. He swivels himself off the sofa until his knees are on the floor, and he leans forward over the cushions, and the weighty sensation of his own hardness in his trousers makes him lightheaded.

John drops behind him, fumbles with the fly on Paul’s trousers, so Paul reaches forward and tries to help but John, again, grasps a handful of hair and yanks Paul’s head back, and Paul’s hands fall still and for a moment, _everything_ is still, except for Paul’s heart which races and his mind which races _What the fuck whatthefuck?_ because John is not usually like this but it’s incredible, this feeling, giving up control and giving it all to John, who never has _any_ control, and maybe that’s what this is about, and Paul closes his eyes and breathes a sigh.

Eventually John lets go of Paul’s hair and Paul presses his face to the sofa cushion as John finishes with the trousers, pushing them down, freeing Paul’s arousal. He knees Paul’s legs apart, presses the length of himself into Paul’s exposed behind, and Paul is still trembling from whateveritwas that happened just a moment ago but also because this is a new thing, and he’s a little worried all of a sudden, and they’re in their lawyer’s living room and he could come home any minute and find them _in flagrante delicto_ and how would they explain that? 

 _We’d need a new lawyer_ , Paul thinks, as John grabs Paul’s ass, gives a hard squeeze, and Paul cries out.

“Stay just like that,” John says, and Paul does.

Because.

John returns and Paul steals a peek and sees he’s brought Vaseline and _Isn’t that curious, that he packed that, brought it with him?_ Paul thinks, but he doesn’t have time to ruminate because John is back behind him and he’s pressing a single, slicked finger within him, and Paul closes his eyes and pushes back against the pressure. It’s not long before it’s two fingers, and then three, and Paul is moaning his pleasure into the sofa as John crooks and scissors his fingers, and Paul’s mind swims as he relaxes and feels John pull away, and he knows what’s coming next but he knows it from the _other side_ , from where John is sitting, so the reference points are off, like looking at a map upside down, a map from his heart to John’s, and it’s backwards and it doesn’t look right but Paul is tracing that line and trying to find his way back home when he feels John push against him, and Paul bites the cushion now and arches his back and then he’s full, completely full.

“You okay?”

Paul nods, reaches a hand back towards John, and they meet at Paul’s hip, interlacing their fingers like that night on the lawn as John begins to move. Paul’s free hand, he reaches that down to work himself, but John is faster; he pulls Paul's hand, holds him tightly, encircling both wrists in one hand and pinning them in the small of Paul’s back. He struggles, desperate to touch himself, and in the struggle nearly loses it. But then John has his hand around Paul’s cock and the thrusts are timed and in sync and _This is part of the plan_ , Paul thinks, even though he can’t think straight anymore.

He moans, muffled against the cushion, and John’s pace picks up.

“You like it?”

Paul nods.

“I can’t hear you.”

“Mm-hmm…”

“Fuck, Paul…”

“John…”

“Christ, I love the way you say my name.”

“John—”

“Fuck—again!”

“John!”

It’s blinding and fast and everywhere, all over the carpet and the front of the sofa and spilling down the inside of Paul’s thighs and still coming, and Paul feels utterly ripped apart as John falls forward, doubled over against Paul’s back. And for several seconds drawn out like years, they pant and heave, just like that.

John mutters something about cleaning up, gets up to get a cloth, _something._ Paul leans against his arms, holding himself up on shaking limbs, and John returns with two tea towels and a can of club soda, which works, and Paul is grateful; no one would ever be the wiser.

Still, eventually, once they're done, Paul leaves a note. _“Sorry Nat. Spilled my drink. Paul.”_

“Yer such a teacher’s pet,” John teases, and Paul doesn’t disagree, because he knows John is right.

John hops in the shower and Paul throws his clothes back on and finds his legs and his bag and he smokes half a joint before deciding to pack the rest of his shit in preparation for the trip home tomorrow, so he’s folding his trousers and dress shirts when John comes in. He’s in a towel, has got his clothes in a bundle clasped against his lower stomach, and it’s the first time Paul really notices how thin he’s become, and for a moment he worries—any good nurse’s son would—about whether John is eating well enough, about the drugs he’s taking, and then he clears his throat and his worry becomes a word, a question.   

“Better?”

John nods but his eyes are hazy focused on the middle distance and he’s deep in thought, and Paul has that feeling again, like he wants to crawl inside John’s brain to understand what he’s thinking or to just _experience_ it for a moment. But he can’t, so he forgets it—that lump in his throat that reminds him that there are physical bodies in the way of their, _What does George call them? Astral bodies!_ which is what he wants, what they both want—and continues to pack.

“How do you feel?”

John’s question. Paul looks up at John, his faraway eyes, and what he _wants_ to say is _Sore. The good kind. The kind that reminds me you were there_ , because it’s true and now he understands what that means—it’s an ache, not a soreness, and it tugs at him when he moves, and his stomach butterflies when he thinks about how it happened, so _that’s what John meant_ —but he doesn’t say it because he’s not sure John would remember. He shrugs instead. “Fine,” he goes, but it’s not the right word, so he tries again. “I feel… “ _Complete. Whole. Loved…_

John sets the bundle of clothes on the dresser beside the door. He’s got something in his hand, a piece of paper, which he uncrumples and sets down too. Paul furrows his brow.

“I was gonna…” John trails off, and Paul looks at the paper and he recognizes it right away, the void cheque Linda wrote her number on—it must have fallen from his pocket—and he steps forward to take it but his hand stops reaching, hovering a few inches above the paper, and he waits for John to finish.

“You were gonna what?” But he knows the answer, written in the crushed paper, and it's so telling it might as well be on a marquee lighting up Times Square.

John shakes his head but doesn’t meet Paul’s eye. “You should call her, before we go,” he says.

“Why?”

“Because you should, Paul,” he says, and that’s all he says before he sheds his towel and climbs into Paul’s bed, and Paul is left holding a slip of paper crumpled and damp but still readable, imagining what brought John to the point where destroying a piece of paper in an act of defiance felt like a good idea.

But he knows.

He knows, and it kills him.

“John—”

“Just stop what you’re doing and come to bed, you twat.”

So Paul does, and stretched out there he feels that ache and he settles his head on the pillow and looks at John and they’re close enough that he thinks maybe John can see him without his glasses and he really hopes that’s true because _read my poker face_ , it’s all there, plain as day. 

“Was that… is that how it goes with them?” Paul asks. “How you do it?”

“No,” John’s reply is quick. “I usually look ‘em in the eyes when they finish.” He pauses. Beneath the covers, he feels John’s hand grazing his thigh. “I never get to do that with you.”

There’s a heartbreaking longing in John’s voice and he wonders what, exactly, put it there. It seems like a cruel joke that this is what Paul has always wanted too—to look him in the eye when he comes—but they never seem to do it that way, and now it feels like they’re running out of time, suddenly.

“John…”

At that, John laughs, and it seems like the moment is broken. “You Catholic boys,” he swallows hard. “The minute you get a saint’s name in your mouth…” he trails off, and the hand that was on his thigh is now fingersmoothing Paul’s hair off his forehead. Paul could die and be complete, and that’s not the first time he’s felt that with John at his side. 

But John takes a breath and continues. “I love the way you say my name, Paul. No one says it quite like you, not even her. I just don’t know that I can handle being a saint…”

John was never one to put too fine a point on anything and this is all he says; his hand falls still against the pillow, next to Paul, close enough for Paul to press his lips and his nose against John’s pinky finger, and soon John is snoring, and Paul feels his heart beating in his throat again.

Darkness falls over their last night in New York City. Their reasons for fighting are long behind them but Paul has the sneaking suspicion that they’re right in front of them too, plus a whole host of new ones. So he keeps his eyes open and does that thing John hates, where he watches him sleep, because he suddenly doesn't know how many more times he’ll get to do this, so he’ll do it while he can.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Photo credit: Getty Images. Photo manipulation by the author.


	7. I Love You More Than The World Can Contain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set the day after Paul announced that he was leaving The Beatles, so 11 April 1970.

 

 

He shows up on Paul’s doorstep with roses and a fucking bottle of champagne because _“People always celebrate weddings with flowers and champagne so who says you can’t you celebrate divorces the same way?”_

And it’s such a fucking John thing to say that Paul lets him in. He lets him in and he puts the champagne in the fridge and he takes one of Linda’s vases and he _fucking puts the flowers in the vase_ like this is the most normal thing in the fucking world and not _twenty-four hours after the world finds out that you’ve broken up The Beatles._

But even that's not  _wholly_ true, not really. John left _months_ ago. Paul just made it official.

It’s only after the roses are on the table that Paul finally turns to John and asks him why he’s here. And for a moment John seems a little hurt by it, but he recovers well enough.

“Is it a crime to want to see your best friend after he’s fucked you in the papers in front of the whole world?”

Paul might have deserved that, but he doesn’t give John the satisfaction.

“You want tea?” he asks. “You know, until the champagne chills, of course.”

“Naturally.”

So Paul makes tea. And they sit in Paul’s kitchen while the kettle boils and the teabag steeps and they don’t say a word, because what _can_ you say, eh? and the whole place smells like roses, which is just fine with Paul because he’s always liked roses, because they remind him of home—Liverpool-home—a strong scent that masks everything else, and that’s what he wants, to mask the scent of John as he sits across the kitchen from him. 

He sits down and pours two cups, and in the impossible chasm—impossible because no one can deny it anymore but also because when did it get so big?—in that space between him and John there’s silence and a cloud of roses and the women they were falling for back when they were in New York and who now have brand new surnames appended to their given ones (well, in John’s case, he’s got hers as well) and now two cups of tea besides and Paul is certain they could fit more in there, because even though John is sitting right beside him a million miles away and suddenly his house feels too small for the both of them and everything else, Paul wants to stuff every guitar he's ever owned into that space because at least with a guitar or fifty between them things could make sense again.

But _this_ is all wrong. It’s crowded and Paul doesn’t like that, and suddenly the roses make him wistful for open windows and front rooms and just-the-two-of-them rainy days which seem to be forever ago, now because _look at what we did in ten years, John; we’re not even thirty yet, John, and look at what we did._

Paul stirs the tea in front of him with the string from his teabag, watching as the leaves in the bag stain the water. Yellow, ochre, red, brown… 

He sighs but doesn’t mean it in any particular way, it’s just a sigh, but of course John looks up, because after half their lives (nearly) spent tuning themselves to the harmonics of the other it's impossible not to notice when a string goes out of pitch like that, so John looks up, and Paul looks up, and for a moment it seems almost possible that this has all been a really fucking _awful_ nightmare. 

_“So what’ll it be, Macca?”_

He’s not even sure if John has asked that question or if he’s just imagined it, but he doesn’t know how to answer, so he doesn’t. Just shrugs. 

“How’s Linda?” 

“Good.” A pause. “Yoko?”

“Good.” Another pause; John lifts his teacup to his lips, slurps, sets it down. “The brood?”

Paul stares at John’s mouth. _Brood? Right, kids. Two._ He blushes. _Get yer shit together, Paul._ “Fine. Mary’ll be walkin’ soon.”

“Right,” John leans back. “Next stop, driver’s license.”

Paul laughs, swallows. “Right.” But it’s not right, it’s all wrong, this. Paul knows it, and he suspects John knows it too, because why else would he bring roses and—

“It feels weird to not want to write songs with you,” John says.

Paul nods but it feels like an insult and he's not sure if that's how it was meant or not but he takes it that way and looks down into his cup. 

John takes another sip from his tea. “You couldn’t pay me to write a song right now,” he mutters. “Unless it was called ‘Yer A Shaggin’ Bastard’.”  
  
“‘A no-good, washed-up bastard’,” Paul adds, looking John in the eye.

“Don’t forget 'self-entitled.'”

That one stings, too, but Paul laughs it off, because John is right there and his hair is longer and he’s desperately thin now and wearing glasses but it might as well be 1958 and this might as well be his bedroom back home and his hands are itching for a guitar or _something else to play entirely_ so he allows it, the intrusion, the insults, because it’s better than not having anything at all, and he suddenly wonders if he can play off his comments as a late April Fools joke… 

John continues, half-singing. “‘ _Self-entitled prick and he’s left ‘is mate’s band and he shacked up with a bird and_ —”

 _That,_ Paul won’t excuse, and his hackles rise as he sets his tea down and leans across the table. “Well, now John, I didn’t _shack up_ with ‘er. I married her, you know. Started a family.”

“Oh, I know _you_ did,” John says without missing a beat, because he saves all his beats for the ends of his sentences now, when he holds Paul’s gaze and doesn’t let go and it takes Paul an uncomfortably long time to realize what he’s saying, that he was talking about himself— _Shaggin’ bastard… self-entitled prick…_ —but when he does John’s face opens up and Paul thinks maybe John is the one with the shit poker face now because Paul can read him like a book, bold-type, letters sixteen feet high— _It was my fault, all of it—_ and Paul sags into his chair and the room closes in until it's just them now, close and intimate as it should have been all along and was for so many years.

“John.”

But John just takes another sip from his tea and leaves Paul to imagine all the ways in which he’s read this situation wrong, played it wrong, handled it wrong, throwing his weight around, making demands, trying to rein it all in because it was out of control and _there it is again, control_ , and Paul shakes his head and lowers his eyes.

“It doesn’t have to be this way.”

“Oh but it’s already done, son,” is the reply. “The damage, I mean. We’re beyond repair.”

Paul wonders if he means the band or _them,_ and maybe he believes it about the former but the latter, he’s not so sure now, because there’s John and after all he brought roses, and there’s no one else home, and now he’s imagining all the places they could go, upstairs, the front room, the back garden, his meditation dome, right here on the kitchen table, _fucking_ _France_ , he doesn’t care, and it’s all so incredibly appealing. But he stops himself because he doesn’t want to misread this situation, and it’s been a while, and Paul realizes with a sharp pang in his chest that he doesn’t really know John like he used to.

“You do love her though,” Paul asks.

“Yoko?” John says. “More than anyone.” Then he adds. “Almost.”

_How do you misread that?_

So it’s with roses in his nostrils that Paul slides his chair closer, then slides off the chair to the next one, that much closer, and somehow their hands end up together on the table top and Paul feels only a little bit guilty about what’s happening because _this is souls touching souls, it’s not tawdry_ , and he knows Linda would understand, but a little guilt thrills through him all the same as John whispers “I didn’t come here for a fuck, Paul,” right before shaking his head— _Who am I kidding?_ —and then he’s leaning into the space between them and kissing Paul like _not only was this the reason you came here, but it’s the reason you were put on this earth in the first place._

_Like I was born to love you..._

“Here?” John breathes against Paul’s neck.

“Anywhere.”

It’s John who stands up first, pushing his way out from the kitchen table, and Paul doesn’t, not at first, but then he sees John’s hands on his own belt buckle and Paul thinks _That’s my job_ and that’s what gets him to move—possession, ownership over the removal of a belt, the undoing of buttons, the sliding down of trousers. He follows the older man through the house that he moves through like it's his, and really he ought to know the way since  _how many times have we done this here?_ Paul thinks, and he catches up to John and his hands find his waist and they pause on the threshold of the kitchen and now they're close enough to share breath and  _this_ , this is right; it's the first time it's been right in months. Paul backs John to the doorjamb and he hasn't kissed him with a beard or been kissed by him with a beard and he wonders if that's going to be strange but he doesn't get the chance to think too hard about it because John's hands are in his hair and his tongue is in his mouth and  _no, it's the same as it's always been_ , so Paul files that worry away. He tilts his head and widens his stance and staggers their legs so he's pressed to John's thigh and John is pressed to his and they're both hard and Paul slips a hand around John's back, down the back of his pants, hauls him up against him—rough—and John makes a noise and bites Paul's lower lip, and they're off.

They take turns pulling each other to the stairs, stopping to kiss at the landing, pawing at each other up the first three steps before pausing, again, and then a few steps later, and _we’re not gonna make it to the bedroom,_ so it's Paul who takes the lead, pulling John down to the stair treads beneath them, sitting down, and it’s rough, rougher than it should be, because Paul remembers a time when this was a kind of elegant melody they could play without thinking, easy like language, like chord progressions. They bump heads, and it smarts, and Paul frowns while John curses.

“Sorry—”

John playfully shoves Paul, and Paul’s shoulder collides with the stairs behind him, and now _he_ curses, shoves John back, a little less playfully, and John comes down hard on Paul’s mouth, hard enough to hurt with teeth in the way, and a sharp tang fills Paul's mouth as he realizes he's bleeding, or maybe John is, he can't tell. Paul pushes back, hard and deliberate, but John won't let go, his mouth hot and wanting, desperately wanting, his knee pressed against Paul's crotch, and Paul squares his shoulders against the stair tread lined up and digging into his shoulder blades, and he cements his hands on the bony flatness of John's shoulders and heaves, wanting to stop this now, out for blood now, and the kiss is sundered but John snaps back it’s Paul's own nose that bears the brunt of it as John's forehead crashes into him with an equal and opposite force to the one Paul pushed him away with. He’s blinded for a moment, and he grabs at John’s shirt collar and push-pulls him until they’ve flipped, until Paul is on top, and then he realizes his nose is bleeding and John’s got a busted lip and he sniffles and fists John’s collar in his hands before letting go and bringing his own hand to his face.

“Fuck!”

“Paul, I’m—” John says. He reaches for Paul’s hips, and the real indignity of it all is that Paul’s finished, sometime in the tussle—he didn't even know it had happened—but he feels it in his pants and he can’t look John in the eye, because he’s got a mess in his trousers and John's got a tooth-sized gash in his lower lip and Paul knows what caused it all, and the thought hits him that maybe they’re too angry for this to work now.

Maybe it _is_ over.

“Let me go, John,” he says, blood dripping from his left nostril and onto the back of his hand as he pushes himself up and walks back down the stairs and into the kitchen, grabs a tea towel, fills it with ice from the icebox, ice from next to the champagne that now he knows they'll never drink so he takes it from the fridge and sets it on the counter, and presses the cold cloth to his nose. 

It hits him that this is how their first time went too—with ice in a bloody tea towel—but he doesn’t say that, because John is behind him now and if he talks, he knows he’s going to cry, from pain and humiliation and because _this is what you do when the love of your life leaves you bleeding on the kitchen floor_.

John doesn’t say a word though either, and the next thing Paul hears is the door opening and he knows that John is gone, and if that’s how it ends—not with a bang, but with the soft closing of a front door in an empty room filled with ghosts and regret and scented with roses, if you can smell past the iron in the blood clotting in your nose—well, Paul has to be okay with that. He cleans up the blood in the sink and the blood on the stairs, because he has daughters now, you know, and a wife who loves him and even though she's a good woman and would understand if he told her, there can't be blood on the stairs that lead to the bedrooms and blood in the sink where they wash up the dinner dishes.

He doesn't cry though. He doesn't cry until long after the kitchen is clean, the tea discarded, the chairs pushed back in. He doesn't cry until he cleans himself up, wipes the blood from his face and the dried come from inside his pants. He doesn't cry until he changes his clothes, and the darkness descends, and he looks out the window and notices that, yes, John car is gone, and then he finds his way to his bed and collapses in tears, a damp towel pressed to his busted nose, and listens intently for something in the nothing that surrounds him, but comes up empty, and he's certain that he's never felt more alone in his entire life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Photo credit: Linda McCartney. Photo manipulation by the author.


	8. I'm Holding My Breath

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lost Weekend, Santa Monica, March 1974. Paul hadn't visited the States in a while as he'd been busted for growing pot on his farm and his visa was denied. It's also true (according to Yoko) that Paul and Linda visited her at the Dakota, where she told Paul to tell John that he could come back to her anytime, as long as certain pre-conditions were met. In the interview I read, she wondered why he did that...so that was the jumping off point for this chapter...

 

 

_  
_

_"So that’s a no then?”_

Four years is a very long time but it’s even longer when they haven’t been talking, not really, and when they can’t see each other because the United States government won’t let him leave and _they won’t let you come in, either,_ so when the visa application finally goes through Paul picks up at the first possible opportunity and drives the whole family to Heathrow and boards a plane and flies first to New York and then on to Los Angeles but he doesn’t breathe, not really, not _really, notreally_ , until he steps into the studio and sees John and John sees him. The room they're standing in holds its breath as they put on airs _—_ Paul covers the quivering nausea wrapped around his solar plexus by faking a show of blustering confidence, a possessive arm around his wife's shoulder, and he sees John look down his nose at him ( _A_ _s he_ _does_...)but they're sparkling, his eyes, and  _he's_ sparkling head to toe _,_ and suddenly it’s like no time has passed at all. They're kids again and this is St. Peter's Church hall and it's 1957. In the space where everyone expects explosions the explosions _happen_ but silently as Paul and John lock eyes for a secret tête-à-tête because words aren't needed ( _were they ever?_ ). Nobody knows what to expect, but  _they_ do, and that's all that matters.

After all this time, after  _everything_.

_Well Johnny, what'll it be?_

“Valiant Paul McCartney, I presume?”

“Sir Jasper Lennon, I presume?” 

He hated that his voice strangled itself in the space around the heart in his throat, had hoped he’d sound more manly, but _who has time for subtext?_ and nothing more needed to be said because it was all right there, still, always, right between them, every time they looked up—Paul from the drums, John from his guitar—and in the way John exclaimed, more than once over the course of that late-night jam session, _Paul and me, man, Paul and me_ , like they were the only two people in a studio once filled with Moons and Starrs and Wonders… 

If they carried scars from that day in Paul’s house, you can’t see them or hear them, because such is the power of nostalgia and the drugs in their lungs and in their noses, and anyway, they’ve hurt each other enough accidentally on purpose over the years that they’ve gotten very good at existing with barbs in their back so it’s really not shocking at all that they can look past it. 

Of course the music they make is terrible and Paul blames the drugs so when he and Linda go home to the kids after it’s all said and done he makes a vow to return the next day when everyone’s sobered up, which he does, him and Linda and the kids all together, but it’s a mad house and then he hears that’s what they’re literally calling it, “The Madhouse”, and he doesn’t get the one-on-one time that he so craved, so it’s back to their lodging to tuck the kids in and Paul slips away once more and Linda understands because…

Well… 

So now Paul is on the beach in Santa Monica and there’s sand between his toes and yes, it’s warm out because it’s Santa Monica, but it’s also the tail end of March and it’s not hot enough for a swim which is what John is suggesting. Paul hasn’t brought swim gear, anyway, but that shouldn't matter, since an ocean skinny dip with John might be just what the doctor ordered, but _No, you'll both freeze your cocks off_  and that just won't do. So he stands on the beach and wriggles his toes and John is at his side and they’re staring off at the spot where the sun set hours earlier, now just a pale smudge against the flat line of the horizon, that place where the ocean drops off the edge of the planet.

_“So that’s a no then?”_

Paul turns to John and his balance falters, just a little, his right foot ending up deeper in the cool sand than his left, but he recovers nicely and regains his equilibrium, except _No, you twat, there’s no such thing as equilibrium when it’s you and him alone on a beach under the stars who are you kidding?_

“I’m not goin’ swimming."

“Suit yerself, Paulie,” John says as he walks ten steps forward and he’s in the surf and _"It's not that bad!"_ he says, but Paul points at a surge coming in a little too quickly, or maybe John is too slow, because the water splashes in and up and he's knee deep in it for a hilarious moment, eyes wide, before he squeals like a child and leaps comically out of the water at the shock of the cold, because _"I told you it was too cold!"_  Paul shouts. He can’t help but laugh, and when John looks up at him to see what’s funny— _Like he doesn’t know_ —Paul does a little imitation dance, impersonating John, and nearly falls over with giggles. 

“Mockery won’t get you anywhere, son,” John teases, dripping wet on sand that shifts beneath his feet.

Paul wipes a tear from his eye and kicks at the sand by his big toe, because he’s losing his balance again, and John is looking at him, and  _isn’t that odd?_

“Who said I wanted to get anywhere?” is what he says, but what he’s thinking is _Fuck he sees right through me_ … 

John just cocks his head to the side as he rejoins Paul where he stands. “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter,” he says, sinking to the sand beside Paul, who does the same, and now they’ve got their legs crossed and John’s feet are wet and glistening and they’re staring at the horizon as the shore tugs on the ocean, reeling it in.

Or maybe it’s the other way around. 

 _Definitely the other way around_ , Paul thinks, though he doesn’t know how he knows that.

“Tide’s comin’ in?”

“Fuck if I know,” John says, pulling a joint from his pocket and lighting it, in probable violation of _a lot_ of local laws, but somehow they’re the only people on the entire expanse of beach and Paul thinks it’s unlikely anyone is going to call the cops if they haven’t already, because with the cast of characters up at the Madhouse, pot is the least of anyone’s worries. So John lights the thing and takes a hit and passes it to Paul. “I guess if we stay here long enough, we’ll find out.”

Paul has forgotten the context of John’s comment, but then a wave cascades in and scrubs away two more of John’s footprints, leaves a glittering trail of broken foam and refracted light stretching back out to the depths, and  _Oh right, we were talking about the tide_. Paul imagines the entire area underwater in a matter of hours and shivers at the thought of sinking to the bottom of an ocean with John at his side.

He draws on the joint, lets the smoke fill his lungs and holds it there until he feels a little lightheaded. When he exhales, the smoke that trails from his parted lips and his nostrils glows, pale and greyish blue in the low light. He swallows, muscles moving, and finds his voice. “How’s California treatin’ you?” 

“About as good as any seductive siren might,” John replies as he leans back on his elbows and crosses his legs at the ankle. “Damn sight better than snow in Manhattan this time of year, y’know. I could get used to having an entire ocean in my backyard.”

Paul takes another hit and passes the joint to John, and with his hands free he leans back into the sand on his elbows and closes his eyes as he exhales, one fluid movement. Then he clears his throat, scrubs a hand over his moustache, picks up a short stick, a piece of driftwood, from the ground beside him and starts to draw circles in the sand. “Well you seem happy,” he says, but a small voice behind his ear whispers _How would you know? You haven’t seen him in years_ and that much is true, he doesn’t know, not anymore. 

 _But he does seem happy, doesn’t he?_ Paul isn’t so far removed from John that he’s unable to tell.

“We are,” John says, and it takes Paul a moment to remember that he’s talking about him and May, the girl holding down the fort up there, the substitute teacher, the hall monitor, the guidance counselor in charge of the unruly pupil while the Principal takes a break, but that’s not entirely fair to Yoko, is it? Paul has just seen John’s wife in New York, and he knows that the woman who replaced him still loves John because _of course you always love John once you’ve loved him at all_ , and she wants him back, anyone can tell that, and Paul has to tell John. But he wonders what all that will mean for the woman in the house behind them, because she’s lucky to have loved John too, and giving that up isn’t easy.

Paul should know. 

He casts a glance up the beach behind them at the rented house and then looks over at John, startled a bit by the fact that John is looking at him, and he takes a breath, seizes the moment...

“Session was a bit shit yesterday, wa’nnit?” John interrupts.

Paul swallows his words, shrugs, switches from organic swirls to ninety-degree angles in the sand. “It was a lark, you know. Just a bunch of guys ‘aving a laugh.”

Of course it  _was_ shit and Paul is happy to hear John acknowledge that. But he doesn't say that. 

“It got me thinking,” John continues, and Paul’s ears perk up, because John thinking is a beautiful thing and it always has been and he hasn’t seen a spark of John’s fire in years so he pays attention now. “I was thinking that we should record again. For real.”

Paul is dumbstruck. “You serious?”

John shrugged. “I don’t mean we should get the band back together or anything, but…” and in that _but…_ lay a whole host of possibilities that Paul hasn’t dared to allow himself to dream about in the years since they’d last been here, and now all of a sudden there they are, unfolding in front of him, and all he has to do is take the first step, which John has already done, so it’s _John leads, you follow_ all over again and Paul has no problem at all with that, no problem at all.

But Paul indulges too long, takes too long to reply, so John continues talking. “I had this dream you were gonna come out here, you know. That you’d come out to LA and we’d bum around town together, couple of old farts takin’ in the sights,” he says, brushing damp sand from his bare legs, peeking out from the rolled up cuff of his jeans which are damp too from the rogue wave. “Then I read in the papers— _The McCharmleys land at JFK_ —and here I am, renting a house where Kennedy and Marilyn fucked once upon a time, and I just had a feeling… you know, Jack Kennedy bringing us together. Or, fuck, maybe I made it happen. Kismet, yeah?” He looks at Paul. “Or fucking Plato and his soulmates thing, I don’t know.”

Paul doodles with the stick as John talks, making it sound so karmic, and Paul has to wonder if maybe John really _is_ some kind of magician because he had no plans to visit, not really, but the confluence of events with the visa and everything happened, and he thinks maybe it’s like, well, _like the ocean and the shore_ , he thinks, looking at the water washing away another of John's footprints. 

He decides, if that’s the metaphor, then he’s the water and John is the sand. John, who stays where he is, and Paul, who returns to John like clockwork. And suddenly John’s comment about soulmates hits him— _He called me his soulmate—_ and he feels it in the ends of his hair and the soles of his feet, because that’s something _he_ would say, maybe something he _has_ said, to Linda in private or to himself in silence, but to hear it from John, well… 

“So you don’t mind that I came?”

There it is again, that soft voice caught up on his uvula, and Paul frowns and tosses the stick away.

John chuckles. “When did I ever mind that?” he asks, his voice low, and Paul knows what he's asking without needing to be told.

They’re both leaning back in the sand now, mirror images of each other but fifteen years older than they were when they first learned how to play this way, and anyway there are no guitars present so this is new territory, in a sense. Another wave froths the beach, close enough that Paul feels the spray on his toes as millions of bubbles of seafoam pop in unison before disappearing into the dampened sand. 

“Last time, we ended up bleeding all over each other on the stairs in my house, John.”

But John’s pinky finger is brushing Paul’s and Paul doesn’t even mind the coarse, gritty sand against his skin between their skin, it’s just a thrill to have John touching him after four years of yelling at each other in song and in the press and to their friends and in their sleep while they’re sleeping a world apart… 

“No stairs in sight,” John says, gesturing around him, the lit joint in his fingertips the only point of focus for Paul’s still-slightly-jet-lagged eyes as his stomach clenches in anticipation. 

“John, I don’t think this can happen,” he says.

John hands him the joint again. “Why the fuck not?”

Paul sighs, takes the joint, inhales, because it gives him a chance to plan his words.

 _Why the fuck not?_ John wants to know.  _Why the fuck can't we devour each other again? Just like the old days?_

_Well, John, because I’ve read the papers too, and I know you’re out of your mind with drink and drugs and that you’ve split with Yoko and you’re here with May and it’s none of my business but Yoko told me she’d take you back, and then I flew here to see you but now I'm also going to tell you that Yoko wants to take you back, I know that's what I'm going to tell you, because I know you want to go back and I want you to be happy, John, but you’ve got to get yourself sorted first, mate, and shagging me on a California beach isn’t going to help you accomplish that, love, it just won’t—_

He wants to say it, but he exhales the smoke in his lungs, releases it to join the constellations winking into existence overhead. John's eyes are on him, awaiting his answer, begging him to answer. But he doesn’t, because he meets John's gaze and _who needs words?_  and that should be enough.

_What'll it be?_

But nothing happens. Because another roiling wave sweeps in on the rising tide and they’re both caught unawares by the shocking cold of it, the wetness, as it blankets them, head to toe, and just as quickly recedes. The joint disappears into the surf. Paul coughs salty ocean water from his lungs and John holds his arms out and they’re splurting and gasping and then they start to laugh, hard, as they leap up on cold and unsteady feet and take off toward the house, hollering and laughing and cursing and tripping and helping each other back up again, and then they’re bursting through the garden gate and around to the guest house, where the towels for the pool are kept, and John fumbles with the door because his hands are shaking and they’re still laughing, and then they tumble inside and shut the door on the yard.

Adrenaline and glee peal forth from their throats in spite of John’s _shushing_ , but as the dark damp settles around them and their eyes adjust, they lose their laughter and shivering takes over. They’re both dumbfounded, stock still, ragged breaths and chattering teeth the only sounds they hear. Paul reaches over and brushes a piece of kelp from John's shoulder; it falls to the floor of the cabin with a sick  _plop_ _!_  and John smiles and does the same but with a piece of seaweed tangled in Paul's hair, and his hands are cold as his fingers linger against Paul's forehead, and Paul sighs, and the moment which began with the closing of a door comes to an end as John steps forward and takes advantage of the close dark. He throws his arms around Paul and backs him against the wall, gently— _remember last time_ —descending on his mouth with a groan that resonates in Paul’s chest, breathed down his throat, a kind of resuscitation that he didn’t know he needed, but now that he has it he sees how half-dead he was all these years, because he's _alive_ now, because John made it so.

And he thinks _To hell with Yoko_ and he kisses him back, harder, deeper, and like thread through the eye of a needle they wind their way into the shadows of the guest house, blind and cold and shivering wet but shivering for other reasons, too.

Saltwater-soaked clothes are dropped where they’re taken off, which means there’s a nearly straight line from the door to the daybed against the opposite wall—Grimm Brothers breadcrumbs, a lifeline back to reality if they need it because _this isn’t reality, this isn’t happening, this is a dream_ —and by the time they get to the edge of that mattress there’s nothing between them but a whisper and their own hands, which are in each other’s hair and tugging and holding, and they stop in recognition of it, both of them at the same time. Mirroring.

“‘Ey Macca,” John says, the same way he’s said it so many times before, and Paul smiles, partly because of the memory, partly because John’s teeth are still clacking together. 

Paul smooths his hand over John’s hair and pulls him down to the bed, its springs groaning under the weight, and John settles between Paul’s thighs, kisses him senseless as they pick up a pace again, just not the same one—no rushing this time—a slower one, making up for lost time by not taking any second for granted. And maybe it’s the partial joint they shared or the cover of darkness or the fact that no one, literally no one—not Brian, bless him, not George or Ringo, not Mal or Neil, not one of the girls—no one is going to be looking for them or wondering where they are. Paul doesn’t know if that's why, or if it's something else. All he knows is the languid push and pull of their bodies on the soft duvet has time to bloom into its own kind of song, another thing they write together, their sighs and the bed’s creaks and the rustling sheets working in tandem to produce something rhythmic and melodic, something Paul had forgotten could be so beautiful.

He seals his mouth against John’s and helps himself to their mutual arousal, each hand full as John hovers above him, all stiff angles and still cold from the water, and Paul thinks _Let’s get the blood moving_ and breaks away, starts to shift, to roll over, but John stops him.

“No no,” he says, pleading, begging almost. “I wanna look at you, Paul. I wanna _see_ you.”

And Paul stops and settles back where he was, not shocked; quietly placated. “Okay,” he says, and John presses into him, another kiss, deeper and longer this time, before he gets up and disappears into the darkness of the small guest house, leaving Paul gasping and hard on the bed, wondering how he got there. 

When John returns, he’s got something in his hand— _Lube or something like it_ , Paul thinks, watching as he slicks himself with it, then asks for permission to do the same to Paul. So he nods, and John’s fingers are inside him now, widening him, easing him open, and it’s new _again_ because they’ve never been eye to eye before and _isn’t this what you talked about once upon a time, way back when—was it in New York?_ and Paul hooks one leg over John’s hip, pivots his own hips, and John, all of John, fills him up.

“Christ,” Paul groans. “Jesus Christ…”

“No son, remember: I’m _bigger_ than Jesus,” John jokes, a bad joke, delivered a little breathlessly, and John shakes his head at the lame attempt at humour, but Paul manages a laugh that turns into a groan the moment John begins to thrust, and Paul loses track of everything except for John’s face, John’s eyes specifically, and so that’s his touchstone, the thing he’ll come back to or, preferably, never stray far from in the first place. And it seems to be fine with John, too, because Paul notices his desire-dilated pupils and the intensity there frightens him, yes, but is enthralling too, because he’s never seen that before. The random women Paul has fucked, they mewl and moan because they think that’s what he wants; the women he’s loved, truly loved, have been all over the map, loud and soft and timid and wild. He’s never seen _John_ like this, though, and he knows that they were young when they started all this and you don’t notice this kind of thing when you're young and selfish, but now that he knows better… _Oh, fuck,_ _what wouldn’t you give to go back in time and experience this_ _every_ _time?_

 _I wanna see you.._.

Paul doesn’t let his gaze falter, and neither does John, and he suddenly feels a million degrees too warm and all that heat, it's pooling below his navel, and John’s _eyes,_ those broken nearsighted eyes—the ones that he used to pretend were fine because he thought glasses made him look ridiculous but they never did, not to Paul— _those_ _eyes_ become all-seeing, or maybe they always were, and Paul feels more naked than he’s ever felt, exhilarated exposed by John's lust, which is as full and big as his own for John. And he knows then that John missed him—really missed him—and maybe that means his still loves him, and  _that's_ what it takes to push him over the edge, because it’s one-two-three more thrusts and Paul's finished, spurting against his stomach, and John furrows his eyebrows, watching Paul come undone.

“Oh fuck—Paul,” he whispers, pressing his forehead to Paul's as his own climax follows.

They should have stopped caring about their messes years ago but Paul can’t help but feel anxious about it the moment the moment is over, probably because it’s not his house and it’s not John’s house but it’s not some hotel either, it belongs to someone else. 

John is still deep within him, unmoving, but Paul unhooks his leg from around John’s hip. “John… we should—” 

“Worry later,” John replies, a little bit lazy with his words, but it’s as if he’s reading his mind and knows what Paul wants. He pulls out, and Paul feels every inch as if it’s three instead, and he curses to the ceiling, and then John tucks along Paul’s side, reaches behind him to the small end table beside the bed, tosses him a box of tissues. 

“Ta,” Paul replies as he wipes up.

“You always disappear like that,” John says, a hint of complaint in his voice. “Right when I need you.”

 _That's a mouthful,_  Paul thinks, but he doesn't know how to respond, so he tosses a wad of tissues to the floor, reaches for a couple more. “What are you on about?”

But John’s gone silent, and Paul finishes cleaning but he’s acutely aware of the bigness of it, his silence, that stillness on his left side. He prefers John sparkling, hates it when he goes cold and sullen, and he fears that this is what’s happening, that he’s done something egregious and the light is leaving or—worse yet—that it’s already gone, and that he’ll be left alone again not bleeding but bloodied all the same, because sundering from John leaves a gaping wound in him every time that never fully heals. He knows this. So he turns to face him, to seek forgiveness for whatever-it-was, and he sees John’s face go soft, wistful, and the worries evaporate. And he smiles and thinks _You’re too young to be this nostalgic_. But he doesn’t say it. He just reaches up and caresses John’s face with the back of his hand.

“I’ve missed this.”

And John closes his eyes and leans his head down against his arm, capturing Paul’s hand against his cheek and holding him there with his other hand, and for a moment the stillness is _theirs_ to share, not something to be hoarded but something to revel in, to be consumed by. 

Of course it doesn’t last long. “Nothing and no one to blame for that but you ‘n yer ego,” John teases quietly.

“‘Ey, get off it,” Paul quips back, and they laugh, and the waves crash against the shore outside and Paul remembers a hotel in Somerset and one of their first times, back before everything got too big and went pear-shaped, before the lawyers and the fighting and the money and the end of the music that was the first thing that held them together.

 _This_ is the moment that Paul chooses to offload the thing he's been needing to tell John, and maybe it's because he's blissed out and a little high, but it seems like the best time to say it.

"I saw Yoko in New York," he says.

John blinks, says nothing; for a long moment, says nothing, and then finally: "Yeah?"

"She misses you," Paul continues. "I think she'll have you back, John."

John relaxes into the pillow, sniffles, moves his legs against the duvet, and Paul does the same, feeling sand there beneath his legs, between his skin and the cover, itchy and rough, and he'll never fall asleep like this, but he doesn't move, doesn't complain.

"If you talked to her—"

“Lemme ask you something, Paul."

“Hm.”

“Did you ever think it was a bit odd that me and Cyn split and then you and Jane split?” he asks. “Or that you married Linda and then I married Yoko? Weeks apart?”

Paul shakes his head. “I hadn’t noticed,” he said, but he blinks and thinks back and it seems that there’s something to that, though he isn’t really all that sure. He lifts a finger and scratches his moustache. “Is that really true?”

John nods; Paul can feel it against his shoulder, and in a moment of onomatopoeic convergence, the _ssssh ssssh_ of the incoming tide and the _ssssh ssssh_ of John’s hair against Paul’s shoulder as he nods, those sounds sync up, and it’s like they’re the same, John and the water. Paul remembers his metaphors, wonders if he got it wrong back there on the beach, imagining himself as the water; maybe John is the water instead.

“Should I go back to her?” John murmurs. “To Yoko?”

Paul chews on his lip instead of saying, you know, _actual words_. Then he shrugs, because he doesn’t know what they’re talking about anymore. “Do you want to?”

John is silent for more seconds than Paul has the foresight to count but it’s _gotta be_ at least a hundred because his post-coital brain has taken his question—”Do you want to?”—and turned it into a song, _their_ song, the one Paul is pretty sure John sang to him once upon a time _was it by the sea in Somerset?_ _“Do you want to know a secret? I’m in love with you”_ , and it’s only two minutes long, only a hundred and twenty seconds give or take, and Paul sings it in its entirety before John answers.

“We were always just missing each other, you and I, weren’t we Paul?”

Paul looks down at John, and John looks up at Paul.

“We didn’t miss each other.” 

_Did we?_

But John turns his eyes back to Paul’s chest, plants a kiss right there against his breastbone that Paul hopes will grow, bloom and blossom next to the doubt that John’s words planted there first. Because now Paul wonders what _was_ missing, really; what more had John wanted? What more could Paul have given? 

The answer to both, Paul knows, is _everything_. Because… well. 

John.

 _It’s a tomorrow problem_ , he thinks as John beds down and Paul tries to ignore the sand in the bed and the slightly itchy patch on his stomach, which John’s arm covers anyway as he snugs up to him. They’re on top of the duvet but there’s a quilt draped over the bed frame, and Paul doesn’t need to fuss much in order to pull it down and over them both as the chill their lovemaking held at bay begins to settle around them once more. 

“Thank you, Paul,” comes John’s murmur.

Paul tilts his head and breathes into John’s hair and closes his eyes and feels all of a sudden like that’s all he’s ever needed to be smoothed over and away himself. In the growing warm beneath the blanket, wrapped around each other and beside each other, it’s not long before they’re both asleep.

And in the battle outside the window, the crashing waves cover the shoreline. For the night at least, the waves have won.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Photo credit: May Pang, 1974. Image manipulation by the author.


	9. The Kiss on My Cheek, Where There Remains But A Mark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize in advance, because this chapter broke my heart to write...
> 
> Set in April 1976, during the day John and Paul spent together at the Dakota.

It’s not Paul’s first time visiting John in New York but as he walks through the ornate lobby, it’s the first time he notices that the apartment building and John seem to be—he doesn’t quite know the right word— _codependent_ in some way. It’s silly, and it’s probably because he’s just caught _Rosemary’s Baby_ again just the other day and now as he steps into the elevator that’s all he can think about, and Paul is left with is the unshakeable sensation that John is living in a Victorian ghost story and somehow wants it that way. 

Maybe, he thinks, maybe it’s the way John shuffles through the hallways, in a bathrobe and slippers, older than he ought to be given his age, especially considering the man had been a Sunset Strip dervish not two years before, drinking and carousing with nary a care. Now he feeds the cats and does the shopping and changes diapers and it’s something that Paul half again admires—after all, hasn’t he settled into a kind of domestication himself?—but it also feels…  _ wrong _ somehow. 

This old, Gothic place has no business containing John Lennon. Or, at least, no business containing the John Lennon Paul wants to remember.

And maybe—Paul doesn’t know for sure, it’s hard to tell because it feels like a lifetime since he really knew John and maybe he really has changed—but maybe this is what John wants. Paul knows that John has always been a bit of a mystery. He’s spent so many years beside an eager wannabe Teddy Boy with fire in his veins who also lives behind a trimmed hedgerow in Woolton, or an eager wannabe bachelor who still settled down and married an angel, sired a prince. He was an eager wannabe/sometimes-was tough guy who pummelled a man once upon a twenty-first birthday party for the mere suggestion of queerness with Brian, but who had danced with him—Paul—in the rain on a Paris street corner and sang love songs to him with only a microphone between them and held his hand countless times since, under the stars and on a beach and in a thousand hotel beds from Cheltenham to Chicago…

_ That  _ John should be sitting with him in dark corner booths in bars that you need to go down a flight of stairs to enter, sipping drinks and listening to music. He should be wearing Paul’s shirt, and Paul should be wearing his, because that’s what they picked up from the end of the bed when they got dressed after lighting themselves on fire again and again and again just to see who burns brighter…

_ That  _ John should be buying plane tickets to far-flung islands and packing a single bag of bare essentials and they should be picking mangoes and coconuts and swimming naked in the sea and falling asleep under tropical moons with their fingers around the necks of their guitars writing love songs to each other, eye-to-eye, like always… 

_ That  _ John should be in a cottage by the sea. He should be wearing wool sweaters and denim jeans that hang on hangers crammed in a too-small closet next to Paul’s. He should be drinking percolated coffee from a tin mug on a mossy porch that faces north, leaning against slate grey clapboard siding, the salt air in his hair and leaving its taste on his skin…

But no. That’s all Paul’s fantasy. 

Maybe this—apparitions and spectres kitty-corner to Central Park—maybe that's what John's fantasy was. There's something of the old Salvation Army grounds to the whole thing, after all, and John has been trying to get back to that for  _years_.  _Strawberry Fields forever, indeed_...

And anyway  _ this  _ John feels like a haunted house himself these days, more and more like his rambling apartment building with each passing day, filled now with memories and not-exactly-emptiness but a vacancy, a space where something used to be, and now all you can see are the ghosts of what lived there once. And he knows that’s how it’s always been. There has always been two Johns—Paul has known that for years. A living one and a hidden one, the ghostly shadow of one. 

_ Two Johns _ .

_ The one who needs you like air and the one who... _

Paul thinks this as the elevator slows and the doors ratchet open, and he steps out into the Lennon-Ono home, wondering which John will meet him there today, and he smiles, because the John who walks around the corner is the one who takes his hand, kisses his knuckles, whispers  _ We’ve got the place to ourselves _ , and his eyes are bright and dancing and Paul drops his guitar to the floor and exhales his relief— _ John who needs you like air _ …—as his fears evaporate for the moment.

“I’ve missed you,” he says.

“Didn’t you ‘ear what I said?” John grins, taking Paul by the hand, like he needs him so badly and _rightnow!_ , like talking is too much effort, and Paul is flattered and puzzled but he won’t over think it, won’t worry too much. There’s no point in doing that. He’s old enough to know that these things unfold exactly as they’re supposed to, and this is how today is meant to happen, so he smiles and squeezes John’s fingers and lets him lead the way past the ghosts in the halls that Paul doesn’t even notice anymore.

They find the room and they wait until the door is closed behind them and the brocaded curtains are drawn  _ just so  _ to kiss, like it’s a private thing, a moment meant only for them, and for the first time—still, after all these years, so many first times—Paul is aware that they’re different now, they’re  _ men _ now, and it’s different because that means this isn’t a stupid infatuation anymore, even though he knows it stopped being that long before they made it big, but there was plausible deniability back then, you see. Because they were kids, and this could be chalked up to experimentation, or fascination, or idolization, or just simple horniness, and after all this kind of thing was against the law not so long ago so there  _ had  _ to be a box to put this in, a boundary around the things they did that separated it from the rest of their lives, their public lives. 

But now he’s married and John’s been married  _ twice  _ and they’re  _ men _ ,  _ grown men _ , with vast fortunes and professional accomplishments and they could be and have  _ anyone _ in the world and yet they still find themselves here with their tongues stealing the words from each other’s mouths, and that has to count for something, doesn’t it?

John never once says how long they’d have to themselves and Paul doesn’t push that particular issue, mostly because he rather likes the taking-time, likes the feel of John’s hands on his body, his tongue on every part of him but  _ there _ , drawing it out in torturous slow motion, something  _ else  _ that is grown up about them now: taking pleasure in the journey as much as in the destination. And they do it without words, guiding each other by touch and sight and barely-vocalized sounds from the deepest places where the Methuselah roots of their love have grown to touch, undressing and laying bare and bearing witness to each other’s pleasure, as if these are miracles performed to studied perfection because it’s been nearly twenty years and this is where their road has led them. 

_ I wanna see you… _

Of course, eventually, the breath in their lungs begins to form words, however incoherent, and then it’s coming together fast and hard, wet kisses pressed to every pulse point, pushing each other into the mattress. Paul isn’t quiet about it because he’s never learned that bit, and John throws his favourite curses out for good measure, and they mess up John’s bed in all the familiar ways before falling heavy and spent to the tangle of sheets and pillows strewn across thirty six square feet of eiderdown real estate on the Upper West Side. For a while this is how they lay, with the afternoon-slanted spring sun creeping through a crack in the curtain, slicing thin layers of hot illumination into their bodies, slivers of warmth inching up their entwined legs, across their bellies, painting them in great long swaths of harsh light that reminds Paul of Renaissance paintings, John’s sleeping face carved out of thin air with  _ chiaroscuro  _ shadows, something to be studied, revered, worshipped. Which is what he does—what he’s always done; he’s John’s biggest fan, whether John knows that or not—but seeing him like this, so alive and vital in the cold middle of this haunted building, it reaffirms everything all over again for Paul. He wants to stay like this forever.

But then it starts to rain and the sun blots away and finally sets behind towering skyscrapers and the state of New Jersey and the room goes grey, and hours have passed when someone finally decides to get dressed and move back to the living room, so that’s where they go.

Nighttime falls over Central Park and they’ve still got the place to themselves, which is odd, but Paul won’t complain because John makes tea and there’s food to eat and the TV is on low and quiet in the corner and it’s raining a bit so there’s that smell in the air and it’s all rather soft and domestic in a way that Paul isn’t really sure he was prepared for. Because that’s also part of the fantasy, the one he’s been creating in his mind since the first time he and John made lunch together in Forthlin Road—John at the pan flipping pieces of bacon, Paul monitoring over his shoulder while the tea steeps, and then bacon butties and biscuits in the front parlour before Father Jim gets home; he thinks he can still taste it after all these years— which was the same day he realized that he was falling in love and couldn’t wait for the day when the kitchen would be  _ theirs  _ and the pots and pans  _ theirs  _ and the cutlery  _ theirs  _ and the front parlour  _ theirs... _

He has his guitar out, and his muted strumming is the loudest sound to interrupt the bemused silence of their night as it stretches out and around them, blanketing them in dark clarity. John sits in an armchair, his right ankle right-angled on his left knee, a smoke in his fingers, watching Paul over the rims of his glasses, and he’s all coy smiles and quiet eyes, but Paul sees a dimness at the edges there, and it’s like someone inside John is pulling brocaded curtains  _ just so  _ and  _ There it is again, that feeling…  _

“Cor, John,” Paul says, and it’s really the first thing he’s said to John in the— _ What’s it been? How many hours? _ —that he’s been there, and his voice cracks as much from not being used like this as from being used  _ very well _ just a short time earlier. He clears his throat.

“Macca,” John mutters into a smile, dragging on his cigarette. 

“You ever think…?” but he waves his hand as he trails off. “Nah, never mind.”

“No what?”

Paul chews his nail. “Do you ever wonder if this is how it could’ve been?” he asks. “For us?”

John’s eyes fall to his cigarette, which he flicks over the ashtray before bringing it back up to his lips for another drag. “Frequently,” he says with his exhale before pausing. “All the fuckin’ time.”

The answer sort of surprises Paul, not because he wasn’t expecting it but because of how quickly and easily the answer came. “Really?”

John lowers his leg and stubs out the cigarette. “Do you?”

“‘Course—” Paul says, and his own smile takes over his face as he leans his head on his knuckles, head cocked to the side. “A house in the country. Horses. Weekend drives to the seaside. Shopping at the market.”

John, dragging on his cigarette, gives a little snort. “You’ve got all that planned out, eh?”

Paul shrugs. “Well—” is all he can manage, because it’s not a serious plan, it could never have been, and John knows that, so all the wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’ isn’t going to make it so. He suddenly wishes he never brought it up.

But John doesn’t let it go so easily. “Wasn’t meant to be,” he says. 

Paul’s voice is small in the back of his throat. “No?”

“Fer the two of us?” he asks. “Couple of queers livin’ in a cottage in the Cotswolds? I bet that would go over real well with the local sheep herders.”

“Oh John,” Paul shakes his head.

“Besides, I was never enough fer ya,” John says, stubbing out his ciggie and tipping his head back, looking down his nose at Paul from across the room.

“That’s not true."

“Nah, you wanted a wife and babies and home and hearth,” John says. “Some of those I could’ve  _ never  _ given you, and the others, well…”

Paul suddenly wonders what it is they’re really talking about here, because it sounds like John is suggesting that he might have tried to give it, but the option had never been given them; and even if it had been an option, they’d seen what had happened to Brian, and he would have likely talked them out of it if they’d tried it before he died and it certainly wasn’t going to happen after, so when was this supposed to happen? 

And then Paul asks it: “When was all this  _ supposed _ to have happened, John?”

And now the fight is percolating and Paul doesn’t care that his face his red but he does care that the curtains have closed over John’s eyes and the ghosts are back and the walls are going up and there’s a drawn haggardness to him that wasn’t there even a moment before and  _ that  _ makes him wish he hadn’t said a thing, but he can’t reel it back and anyway John is opening his mouth to speak, and when John goes from thoughtful to speaking, even when he’s angry, Paul can’t help but listen.

“Two years ago you came to Santa Monica,” John says. 

Paul nods. “What about it?”

And there’s another long silence while John ruminates and Paul wonders if perhaps he’s meant to divine the answer to his own question but John finally leans forward. 

“You could have kept that to yourself, you know.”

“What?"

John nods. “You could’ve come to Santa Monica and asked me to run away with you and I’d have fuckin’ gone, McCartney, I’d’ve let you drive me anywhere,” he says, looking at Paul over the rim of his glasses. “But you didn’t. You came to me and you told me she wanted me back, and you knew full well that I would go back to her. You  _ knew  _ that. You had all the cards, you could see the whole deck, every hand and how they’d be dealt, and you chose the one that would keep us apart when you could have chosen the one that kept me with you. And I’m  _ so fuckin’ curious  _ about why you did that?” 

It had never occurred to Paul that there might have been another option; he sees it  _ now  _ of course, sees the path untaken revealing itself one stone at a time. It makes him crazy to think about, and he’s defensive in a way he hasn’t been in a long time. “And you could have thrown out Linda’s number too. Remember that?” His stomach pits. “We made our choices.” 

“Yeah, it’s too late now,” John says. “It’s too late to talk about what could’ve been, because that ship has sailed and we’re on  _ this _ course now, and this is the best it’s gonna get.” He stubs out his cigarette. “You comin’ over when it suits yeh and bringin’ yer bloody guitar and we have a laugh and we screw around and then you leave again, and that’s it.”

The ghosts are back in full force and, with clarity of vision he never possessed before, Paul sees and understands that they exist because of him, because of  _ them _ , and that John is haunted by a past that won’t let them go into a future that will never be theirs. And he’s gutted. What warmth left in the room after the sky turned to slate and stole the sun away disappears, and everything is just cold and quiet now, and he hates it. 

“John…”

“Look,” John says. “I’m not mad. I’m not upset, not anymore.”

“You used to be?”

John scoffs. “Every single time I saw the McCartney Menagerie in the paper or on the bloody news, yeah!” he laughs but it’s bitter. “You and Linda and the girls, one big happy… and me, left behind—”

“ _ You  _ left behind?!” Paul’s words strangle him as they come out of his mouth, and he knows it’s stupid to get into a Who is More Pained pissing match with John Winston Ono Lennon but he can’t fucking help it, because  _ god damn it, John, you’ve been halfway out the fucking door for years and what was I supposed to do?  _

But he doesn’t say it. Because John hears the hurt in his voice and he gets it without needing to be told.

The TV is still on and Saturday Night Live is starting, which means it’s late and Paul looks at his watch and wonders where Yoko is, where Sean is, and he looks up at John like he wants to ask him, but as he starts to ask it, John gets up and stalks across the room and Paul is left to fumble with his mouth half open around words unspoken.

“You should probably go, Paul,” John mutters, and Paul hears the door to the bedroom swing open and John disappears inside only to return moments later with Paul’s coat and his shoes and he tosses them to the floor next to Paul’s guitar case, and then he takes Paul’s guitar right out of Paul’s lap and Paul thinks he’s about to throw that, too, and he stands up to protest, reaching for the neck of the thing. But John doesn’t do anything with the guitar. Because in that moment a string snaps clean and the  _ twang  _ of the coil reverberates through the space as both men clutch their ends of the guitar. It takes Paul a long moment to realize that the string has snapped back and hit his hand, because the sting of the wire across his knuckles starts to sing and he lets go of the body where he’d grabbed it and grabs his smarting right hand in his left instead. John just stands there, holding the left-handed acoustic, one string bobbing there in the air, and it's like that day twenty years ago in Paul's bedroom but in reverse now, and neither of them speaks. 

Then John backs to the wall behind him, sinks to the floor. The guitar cracks against carpet but doesn’t break.

It’s John who breaks instead.

Paul watches as his best friend, his partner, the very love of his life sinks his head into his hands and begins to cry, great big sobbing cries, and Paul forgets his hand. 

“I just wanted a nice day with you, Paul,” he said. “I just wanted one nice day with you, away from everything else, all the bullshit. The people. Everyone.”

“I know,” Paul says, his voice coming out meek and soft. He clears his throat. “I thought we had a good day.” 

“I want it to be like the old days.”

It’s comments like that that nearly break Paul’s heart and he shuffles his socked feet against the floor and looks down at his toes. “So do I,” he says. “But that’s not possible, John. So we have to make the best of what we have now.”

“What do we have now?  _ This _ ?” He gestures around him. “Me sendin’ my wife and kid away so I can have a romp with you?" He looks up at Paul through accusatory, pleading eyes. "What lies did you tell Linda about where you were today, hm?”

Paul shrugs. “It’s not ideal, but…”

“It’s fuckin’ awful, Paul! I hate this. I hate that this is all we have. That we  _ could have had  _ something amazing and wonderful  _ together  _ and now it’s been reduced to  _ this _ —”

Paul sinks beside John, reaches over and grasps his hand, and now they’re both crying, pressed to the wall, small and together. 

“We could still do it, John. We could make this happen…”

“No,” John shakes his head. “No, it’s too late.”

Paul’s desperate hands massage life into John’s. “Listen to me… remember when we were going to buy an island?”

John sniffles, nods. “Fuckin’ stupid idea…”

“It was a  _ beautiful  _ idea, John. We could buy an island now.” Paul grips John’s hand even tighter between his two. “We could buy an island, somewhere in the Mediterranean. The South Pacific. Buy an island and build a house—”

“I’m not building a house,” John snarls. “Someone would definitely fuckin’ build the house for us.”

Paul laughs and swipes tears and snot from his face. “Or—John, remember Paris?”

A choked sob escapes John’s lips. “Fucking Paris…”

“Fuck-ing Pa-ris,” Paul repeats, drawing out the syllables. “We could rent the room we stayed in. We could buy the entire  _ building _ . Room after room of  _ ours _ , John. All ours. We could do that.”

“We could?”

Paul’s not finished. “And every night we could go out walking. Wear a pair of silly little hats and fake mustaches and we could hold hands—” he squeezes John’s hand, and feels John’s fingers interlace with his own, “—and we could take hours to kiss under every streetlight in the city—” and he slides impossibly closer and tilts his head and catches John with a kiss that refuses to die.

“We could go anywhere, John. Go anywhere, do anything, be anything we wanted to be.”

John moves to shake his head but he and Paul are occupying the same space now and Paul won’t let him disagree. He holds his face in his hands and kisses him again, kisses him senseless, and he knows it because he  _ feels it _ , the way John kind of slackens a bit, and Paul wonders if that means he’s won. And now in his mind he’s planning their getaway: they’ll pack John’s things into a bag or two and they’ll catch a flight back to London and get the rest of Paul’s stuff, the essentials, and then from there they’ll charter a flight to  _ god only knows where, it doesn’t matter _ , and yeah, he’ll have to cancel the rest of the tour, and there’s bound to be some awkward conversations between him and Linda, but she’s a good woman, so understanding, and maybe she’ll want to find a way to help them make this work so that he and John can be He-and-John for the first time, really the very first time, without needing to break up two marriages,  _ it’s the nineteen-seventies for fuck’s sake, don’t people do this all the time? _

He deepens the kiss, mind still racing, and then he pulls away and he can’t tell if his face is wet from his tears or from John’s, but it doesn’t matter, he pulls away and cups John’s face in his hands and searches his eyes for understanding and finds soft sadness but not ghosts, not anymore.

“I want to spend the rest of my life with you, John,” Paul says, and he means it, and it’s so easy to say he doesn’t know why he never said it earlier. “I want to wake up with you every day and go to bed with you every night. I want to eat breakfast and go for walks and write songs and all your cats will become our cats—”

John sniffles and laughs a little. “The McCartney-Lennon family…”

“Or Lennon-McCartney.”

John smiles, and Paul accepts it, his heart at ease for the first time in what feels like years. He swallows past the lump in his throat and fresh tears spring to his eyes and he kisses John again. “I’ll fuckin’ marry you, John. If you’d have me.”

“‘Course I would, you stupid git,” John says.

If hearts could sing…

It seems like there’s so much planning to do. So much to undertake. So Paul finally stands and collects his things. “We can leave tonight,” he says as he moves through the apartment. “We don’t need much, not at first. Just enough to get us through a week, maybe, wherever we go. We can send for more if we need it. How do we break the news to Linda and Yoko?” he pauses, but only for a moment. “I don’t know. I guess we’ll think of something…”

“Paul—”

Paul stands up, stands still, and sees that John hasn’t moved. “What?”

“We don’t need to do this tonight.”

“If not tonight, then when?” he replies. “Next week? Next year?” Paul crosses the space between them and kneels in front of John. “I don’t want to wait another  _ second  _ to start living my life with you, John."

John takes Paul’s hands in his. He notices the sizeable welt from the guitar string. “Your hand,” he whispers, bringing it to his lips to kiss it, three times in a line from index across to pinky finger. Then he looks up at Paul and Paul looks down at him, and they both stand, using each other as leverage, and it’s remarkable that they’re the same height, that they can look each other in the eye when they’re both straight up, because it means everything lines up, the two of them together like this, as if it  _ makes sense _ .

Paul thinks John is going to go with him, start packing, and he’s like an explosive just waiting to be ignited when John does the unexpected and pitches his arms around Paul and clasps him tightly to his chest. 

Hugging, now  _ that’s _ not something they do all that often, not like this, and it takes Paul by surprise to feel the length of John—collarbone to knees, anyway—pressed against him and he’s holding on for dear life, John is, with his arms around Paul’s shoulders and his face buried in Paul’s neck. Paul threads his arms around John’s middle and pulls him close, inhales the scent of him off his t-shirt, sighs against his shoulder.

“I love you, Paul,” John says.

“I love you too.”

John won’t pull away, so Paul doesn’t let up either, but after a while the embrace loosens a bit and John kisses his way to Paul’s neck and his ear and then his jaw and chin and then his lips, and at his lips he lingers, delves deep, and Paul soars and he hopes that John is soaring too.

“Come back tomorrow,” John says finally

Paul deflates. “Tomorrow?” Tomorrow is a whole night away, a whole moonset and sunrise away, and so much can change between now and then that he panics. “Can’t I just stay here then? We can take the day and make a night of it…”

John considers but ultimately shakes his head. “Everything will be clearer in the light of day,” John says.

_ That’s what I’m afraid of _ , Paul thinks, wondering if these are the kinds of plans that need to be made and carried out under the cover and safety of darkness, when their ideas are matched by their bravery. 

“Tomorrow? Really, John?"

“Tomorrow.”

So Paul accepts, holding out hope that John is right and the morning will bring with it the clarity they need to put this wild plan in motion. He’ll come bright and early, and he’ll bring his guitar and he’ll pack a few extra things from his suitcase at the hotel, and if luck is on their side they’ll be in a plane headed for  _ wherever  _ by lunch time. 

Paul clings to that like a liferaft, because he doesn’t know what he’ll do otherwise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Of course we know that the next day there was no meeting, this was it, and John and Paul never saw each other again. So the story goes.
> 
> Photo credit: Mike McCartney. Photo manipulation by the author.


	10. Beloved My John, So I'll Carry On

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set in December, 1982.

 

It’s December, the second one since, and Paul is certain now that, without a doubt, this is a month he will always wish he could leave behind.  

_You can’t do that, you twit._

No. Right. Because he has children who still believe in Santa and they count down the days with chocolates and sweeties until they can open presents. December is important for them, for many reasons. But for Paul, December—this December, all future Decembers, all memories of past Decembers—are best left in the dustbin. In fact, he'd happily trade December for two cold and rainy Novembers and skip right on into another cold and rainy January, thank you very much. No lights, no festivity. Just damp and dark and grey as gunmetal and—  

_No. Slate grey. Clay grey. Grey like shadows, like graphite, like the fog._

_Not gunmetal..._

Paul takes a shuddering breath and sighs it out and realizes once again that that’s not how time works. You can't skip what pains you. You can't ignore it. You have to—

  _You have to live through it, even if grief makes you wish differently._

John taught him that. 

_That's right!_

Paul sniffles and presses his face into the pillowcase beneath his head and he's forty years old now but for a moment it’s like he’s back there—on the day he's remembering, the day when John showed him the meaning of grief—holding John as he cried for his dead mum. The day Paul realized he really _hadn’t_ cried for his dead mum and then the tears started and it was the first time Paul had cried in front of John, and they were clutching at each other’s shirts in their pain and just _for something to hold on to_ , and that’s really the long and short of how they came to be entangled with one another, _that’s_ the crux of it. Yeah, mutual attraction; yeah, sexual tension and all that. But John was his buoy and Paul was his.  

John taught him how to feel. How to feel _everything_.  

What did Paul teach John? 

_How to write a song. How to be a proper musician. How to channel the feelings into art._

_How to be a father. How to be a better man._

_How to love. How to be loved—didn't quite get there though._

_Yer daft if you don’t know that…_

But it’s not really all that daft, because all of that seems and feels like a lifetime ago, he's forgetting so much, and really  _It has been two years_ , Paul thinks— _Only two years? Or two of the longest years of his life?_ Paul thinks it's probably, somehow, both at once—and honestly this is what he tells people when they ask him privately how he’s doing, because he must still look a bit shattered sometimes. So when his eyes go faraway and mist over a bit and they ask “ _How are you, really?_ ” he just smiles and says “ _It’s been two years_ ”, the biggest non-answer he could give, like it’s not a big thing to have your best friend forcibly, violently ripped from your life. Next year he’ll say “ _It’s been three years_ ” and then three years will become five, then ten, and eventually it won’t be a line he feeds them anymore because time heals all wounds, as the poets say, so eventually this will go away.

But _We were poets once upon a time, weren’t we Johnny?_ and that’s not something they ever said.  _We never said that time heals wounds or anything like that._ _We didn’t really write about loss like this. Did we? We didn’t turn those feelings into art?_

_Didn’t we?_

Love, yes. Not loss. Not grief. Not on this level. 

_We were Northern men…_

_Bollocks to that_ …

So Paul is suddenly again self-conscious about it, these shows of emotion. He keeps busy. He whiles away the long days doing menial tasks, tending to The Work—writing, recording, performing—when he has to. He spends time chopping vegetables for dinner or tidying the coffee table, playing with the kids, reading, and it’s the kind of stuff that got him raked over the coals as a hopeless square over the last decade or so but he doesn’t have time to worry about what people think of him anymore, even though he still does it, that worrying. 

_Still reading everything anyone has ever written about yeh…_

But when there’s nothing more to do, he crawls into bed and puts his head on the pillow like he’s doing now and he stares at the wall. It’s private, these moments, all his, because the kids know not to disturb and Linda sees to it that they don’t. 

Sometimes he tries to sleep. He always tries not to cry.

The newspapers are still so often filled with pictures and stories still and, especially now, it’s all over the telly but unlike that first December—when Linda babysat as often as she could, keeping the paper from him and switching the channel to something else, anything else, whenever she was around, and when she wasn’t his older children, Mary especially, did it instead, and Paul still feels a little bit shameful for being the parent parented by his daughter, but _desperate times and all that_ , he tells himself, as if that’s supposed to make it okay—unlike then, he can manage it himself now, occupy his mind and keep himself from spiraling as he knows he’s capable of doing.

But there are memories of John all around him, inside him, and there’s no cancelling a newspaper delivery or changing channels when it comes to memories is there? and _O teach me how I should forget to think!_ comes to mind because thinking is all he’s doing right now, and when he thinks, there’s John. It's more than physical memories—sure, when he turns the corner into the front room, there’s John, and there’s John out in the back garden, and there’s John at the kitchen table, but here’s John i _n the palm of my hand, in the grooves of my fingerprint, in the blood flowing in the veins under my skin_ , and it hurts like drowning every time it happens. 

Even when he sleeps he can’t get away from it. 

 _Especially_ when he sleeps.

_Ah but he’s lovely when he sleeps, our Paul..._

But, Paul thinks, he wouldn’t _want_ to get away from it. There’s a kind of cold comfort to the persistence of John in his life right now that he hopes will never go away. He dreams about John, nearly every night. They’re always doing _something_ ; something that they did once upon a time but in the dream it’s different—subtly different, like they’re writing songs together but they’re in Aunt Mimi’s front parlour and not at 20 Forthlin 

 _That’s not how it happened, but I rather like the acoustics in here so, yeah, let’s play that one again, the one about scrambled eggs_...

 …or radically different, like they’re on stage in front of the Queen Mother and it’s 1963 and _rattle yer jewellery_ and all that, but they play the medley from _Abbey Road_ instead and everyone loves it.

_Of course they love it because it’s great, the best of both of us, a piece of your song, a piece of mine, strung together like Christmas lights on the eaves of a house we should have bought._

_Fucking Christ why didn’t we buy a house together?_

These differences don’t matter of course, it’s all about being there with him, with the band all together, and whether they’re young or old or somewhere in between it doesn’t matter because, really, John is there and that’s the point.

_I’m glad you feel that way, son…_

Sometimes in dreams they don’t do much of anything, though. They walked around Liverpool one night, pointing out their old haunts, naming the girls they pulled from that corner, or that pub, or after that show; another night they just sat and fed the birds in Sefton Park. 

_Oh right! That was fun, couple of old geezers with a bag of breadcrumbs between them._

But they're never old. When this happens it’s always the John he fell in love with—the one with the close-cropped hair falling in his eyes behind the Buddy Holly glasses for the first time—because that’s how he’d liked to remember John—young and beautiful, dynamic, animated, with a whole life ahead of him and none of it written in stone yet—and it’s how he eventually wants the whole world to have seen John, but for now he hoards him like John is gold, because John _is_ gold.

 _Was gold?_  

 _No, don’t you go there_.

Paul thinks as his eyes mist over and he turns to look at the ceiling. Putting John in the past tense is something he can’t do. John is _vital_ . John is _present_ . John is _now and now is John and fuck, here I go again…_

_It’s ‘cause you hold it in the rest of the time, love. If there’s one thing I learned since The Beatles went tits up is that screaming once in a while really is helpful…_

There are wishes and regrets all around him too. Big things, like the fact that he let the band get in the way of their friendship…

_Guilty as charged._

…and little things like how he didn’t call often enough, didn’t tell him he loved him often enough. 

_No, you did, I promise._

And maybe those little things are actually the big ones, because they’re the ones he mulls over the most in his pensive moments, but it doesn’t matter really. What matters is that there are these regrets, and of course the biggest ones involve not making the time or the effort, and if he could do it all over again, well…

_That’s not how this works either. You don’t get do-overs…_

So the minutes drag on and on, the relentless forward march into this bleak future without him. Not that he had him before. They were often an ocean away, and even when they weren’t there was a gulf that couldn’t be bridged again, but at least there was the _possibility_ , the _chance_ —however slim—that they could get back there, someday—into a recording studio, writing songs, sharing a microphone; falling together like binary stars stuck in orbit around their own barycenter, their shared and mutual and deep and burning love for one another—and now _that_ is  gone, and suddenly Paul feels very guilty for admitting to himself that this is part of his sadness, because there is a wife and two sons and many others who are grieving the loss of a very real and every day presence, and Paul is grieving the _idea_ of that presence, and _aren’t you being selfish?_

 _No. No you aren’t being selfish. It's okay to grieve like this._ _We didn’t have each other nearly long enough._

But Paul can’t help it. He is being dragged unwilling, kicking and screaming, further away from a world in which John Lennon—his very best friend, one of only a handful of people to _really know him_ , the _first_ to know him if he really stopped to think about it—from the world in which he lived and breathed and Paul is powerless now to stop the spiral he is spinning down into as he panics his way through the seconds that won’t stop no matter how much he begs and cries and pleads for time to stop, rewind, bring him back to any day before _that day_. 

_Oh love…_

His chest is tight, breaths gasping now as he curls on his side and starts to cry.

_Ah, Macca, yer eyes’ll get all puffy if you keep that up._

Paul rolls over and looks to the corner of the room, and his eyes are bleary but John’s there, sitting on the end of the bed, half-turned to face him, and Paul half-sighs, half-sobs. He's not surprised. He knows John has been there for a while now. 

“I don’t care,” he whispers.

“You do,” he replies. “That mug of yers…”

There’s a long pause—a _long_ pause—before Paul sniffles and rolls over all the way so he’s on his other side now, not just on his back, facing John, or the space John is occupying, because he’s not _really_ there—Paul _knows that._  

“But do you really know that, Paul?” John says, because he can read his mind, because _it’s all in your mind, Paul, John’s not really here._

_Aren’t I?_

But he indulges the part of himself that sees John sitting there, just as he’s done for who knows how long, and splays his fingers against the bedspread.

“I turned forty this year.”

“Right, that was this year! Christ, yer old.”

Paul chuckles because _That’s such a John thing to say_ , but then he slows down, smooths his fingertips against the cool cotton, because—he does the math really quickly, then takes a breath: “I’m older now that you’ll ever be, did you know that?

John doesn’t smile, doesn’t crack wise, doesn’t look sad or angry; he just sits there. “It was bound to happen, Paul,” he said.

“I know.”

It’s only then that he grins. “Doesn’t mean I don’t love the fact that I’m no longer the oldest.”

“You were never—”

“Oh right,” John says. “I mean out of the two of us, of course.”

“Right,” Paul laughs, feeling his chest give way, wet sand crumbling through his ribcage. “I miss you.”

“I know you do.”

Paul sniffles again. “Do you miss me?”

“Not in the way you might think I do.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Well that’s kind of the point," John says, his eyes twinkling. "Some mysteries need to stay mysteries until you can experience them yourself.”

Paul nods; it’s a kind of wisdom he can’t question so he must accept it, and he does, because. Well. John. 

And they’re talking about Heaven after all, or whatever this is. So there’s that too.

"I liked the song.”

Paul snaps back to attention. “Which one?”

"The one you wrote to me."

Paul isn’t exactly shocked but he’s somewhere in that vicinity, like shock and whatever-this-is-he’s-feeling share a neighbourly fence and have barbecues on the weekend, but he tries to hide it. “You heard the song?”

There’s a pause. “You _know_ I did, Paul.”

And he does. Of course he does. He felt it when he wrote it. He feels it every time he sings it. Paul looks down at his hand on the bedspread, still splayed, maybe in anticipation of another’s hand once upon a time, _someone to hold on to_ … 

“I think I’m forgetting, John.”

“Nah, you’re just ‘aving a moment,” John says. 

“No, I’m serious,” Paul retorts, not able to lift his eyes, strangely enough, because as much as he wants to look at the man he knows isn’t there he still can’t shake the feeling of shame over what will quickly become an emotional outburst, so he averts his gaze in case he starts to cry in front of him. “I forget what your voice sounds like,” he says instead. “Or the way you smelled, how you tasted, how you used to look at me.” He closes his hand on the bedspread, opens it again, finds it still empty, and his heart breaks a little bit more. “The way your hand felt in mine, what it felt like to touch you, John.”

"Oh Paul—"

"It's like I'm watching it through gauze and I can't see everything. It’s all fuzzy now. And some of it feels like I'm making it up, filling in gaps, but the gaps are so big sometimes, so I don't know what's true and what's just this _story_ I'm writing in my head, and—"

“Well that’s how memory works, innit?"

“Yeah but I want it to be like a movie. I want to play it back and see it how it _was_ , how it _happened_ , not the way I _remember_ it.”

John laughs. “Well, _that_ doesn’t make much sense, but—” he trails off, and that’s what gets Paul’s attention as he looks up and sees that John has that quizzical look on his face, one he’s seen a million times before but which looks strange on him now, because by rights he should be forty-two years old but he looks twenty-four instead, and Paul is filled with such longing for those days that he can feel it, like it’s part of the room he’s in, like the memories are the air pressing in on him from all sides, like he’s living inside it and it’s 1964 and they’re young gods on their way to superstardom but they just don’t know it yet—

_Oh we knew, son. All along, we knew._

For a split second this doesn’t feel foreign. It’s never felt frightening. But right now it’s rather… _nice_ . Just: _nice._

Still, John has that look, and Paul is curious as always, and before long he realizes he’s been waiting for too long for John to pick up speaking, so he opens his mouth and fills the silence with noise. “What is it? Why did you stop?”

“Come on, Paul,” John goads. "You haven't forgotten a thing."

“What do you—?"

“In Paris—what was it? The day of my birthday? The day before?” John smiles. “We walked around for hours..."

Paul nods as the vague memory resurfaces, of pushing pavement beneath their feet, putting miles into the soles of their shoes and up into muscles already sore from so much walking during the day and so much not-walking every night. He quirks a smile; he thinks he can hear the song that stopped them, outside a Left Bank cafe, during a rainshower...

“Sure, I remember.”

“And then what did we do?”

Paul sighs and cocks his head to the side and he breathes and the word slips out along the column of air slowly jettisoned from his lips. 

“We danced…”

“And what did you say?”

_An October drizzle has begun to fall and there’s a cone of orange light beneath every streetlamp lining the long cobbled street that stretches out in front of and behind them as if every point on the map is pointing here, to them, like they’re at the center of it all and everything begins here and ends here, which is what it feels like when John stops, pulls Paul closer, it feels like the world is ending, and it is, because the world before John held him like a lover isn’t a world that can exist alongside this one, where John takes his hand like it’s made of spun sugar and lifts it to his lips, which are the only warmth in all of Paris, Paul is certain of it._

_“You hear that?” he kisses, one-two-three-two-four-three-one in order from pointer to pinky and back again, like he’s playing a song and Paul’s fingers are the piano keys._

_Paul hears the distinctive warble of Edith Piaf’s voice drifting out from the cafe opposite them. He smiles. “Times like this I wish I spoke more French.”_

_“Whaddya need to learn French for?” John drawls, stepping into Paul’s personal space, a little too close for comfort, ensconced in the sorbet glow of millions of raindrops, each one a tiny sun, and suddenly Paul feels very exposed and very self-conscious, because yeah homosexuality hasn’t really been a crime in France since the last time they beheaded a king but Paul grew up under different skies and walking on different cobbles and that’s where he’s rooted now, in that place where this, what’s happening here, could get them thrown in jail and…_

_“John—”_

_“The only kind of French you need to know…” he trails off as his lips find Paul’s and they kiss, right there in the street, and no one notices, because it’s Paris, je t'aime je t'aime je t'aime. Paul feels his body relax into John’s because there’s no need to worry anymore. They sway to the music, arms around each other, rain dazzling around them, and Paul breaks the kiss, dips his head to John’s neck, breathes in a lungful of him, willing him to bind to the oxygen his blood cells need because he needs John just as much as oxygen, doesn’t he? And the scent of John is a mix of cigarette smoke and Daz laundry soap but something else, something ineffable but wholly his, Paul is sure of that; he’s earthy and sweet. But it’s a deep sweetness, like nearly overripe stone fruits at the tail end of a blistering summer, and the smell of the earth after a rainstorm, and maybe, Paul thinks, maybe it’s just the smell of this rainstorm that he detects, but that’s not entirely true, because this is how John always smells. And then it hits Paul what it is, how he can describe it._

_"Home,” he whispers._

_“What’s that love?”_

_Paul pushes his nose into the fabric of John’s coat, squeezed his shoulders a little more tightly. “You smell like home…” he says._

Paul chokes up and nods. “Oh right,” he says. "I remember..."

John nods. “And what about when we were in The Bahamas? Remember kissing me on the airplane stairs in the Bahamas?”

“I never kissed you on the stairs, John—”

“You _nearly_ did…”

_Paul hears the shouted ‘Cut!’ and he’s already off, bounding up the stairs into the airplane because he saw a good spot for a toke in the forward lavvies when they were touring the plane just before they started filming, and John is at his heels because he saw the same thing, but as they giggle and push their way into the cabin and out of the heat of the Bahamian sun, he feels John’s hand nearly on his hip and he’s nearly a goner, right there on the top stair. He spins around and his hand lands in John’s and they’re still within view of the entire crew and their co-stars and George and Ringo but Paul almost doesn’t care. It’s up to John to push his way in, away from the eyes, past the narrow aisle, to shut out the world, and they don’t get the joint out, they just fall into each other like public propriety had been the only thing holding them up._

_John’s lips are warm and sun-chapped but to Paul it’s an oasis and he’s been traveling through the desert for days, that’s what it’s like. And even though Paul can taste the cherry Lipsyl John is using, there’s a hint of mint from the gum John had been chewing not long before; not unpleasant, not at all, but it’s masking what he wants to get to, that other taste, the one that is better than a flavour, soft and surprising, even though he knows it’s how John always tastes, like a Chordettes song _—sweeter than candy on a stick, lollipop is mi-i-i-ine._  But no, that’s not it, that's not all of it. Paul feels it in the base of his spine, incendiary sparks firecracking up his vertebrae, and it’s like that’s where he _ _tastes_ _it, which makes no sense. He tastes it there and in the tingling tips of his fingers and just below his navel where it coils as John’s tongue finds the backs of Paul’s teeth and then he tastes it_ _there_ _too. Like a promise, like their future, like getting drunk on malt liquor and watching the world tilt in your line of vision._

_Kissing John is magical._

_He doesn’t want to pull away, and John’s hands are on his belt now, and Paul wants nothing more than to let John sink to his knees and take him in like they’d talked about doing all day, in between takes and before they arrived on set and, Christ, it’s what they did that morning at the hotel when they woke up a full forty-five minutes early by accident and couldn't fall asleep again, not with the cool shadows of pre-dawn spilling across their room and each with the other close enough to touch._

_But they don’t, because George is tromping up the stairs outside and Ringo is in hot pursuit, and the weed is something they’ll all share, so John pulls away and nips at Paul’s lower lip and then  he pulls out two joints and lights them both, one fluid motion, ink in water, that ends in an inhale just as George opens the door._

_“Started without us?” he asks._

_“Something like that,” John drawls, and Paul has to sit down, for obvious reasons, but they don’t take their eyes off each other. And the joint tastes sweet, like John, on account._

He knows what John is doing now, and he doesn’t mind at all. “I remember…” Paul smiles. “Just like I remember the way you used to peer down your nose at me…”

“Oh yeah,” John smirks…

 _It’s all a blur, fast movement and strumming and the room dilating and coming into focus again, because it’s John and him and they’re writing songs and they’re good songs—okay, maybe not _ _all_ _good songs—but they’re having fun, and Paul’s heart is soaring in his chest beneath the tight weave of his black sweater, and he laughs, and John stops half-singing._

_“You fucked it up,” John says._

_“I laughed! That's all I did."_

_John pushes himself up straight, rolls his shoulders, works out the kinks at the base of his neck. “It’s not that good.”_

_“It’s great!”_

_“Then why the fuck’re you laughing at it?!”_

_Paul sighs and sets down his guitar with a half-laugh. “I’m not laughing at the song, John,” he says. And maybe he shouldn’t push it, but he does, because why not? It’s true, and John’s surly anyway, so go for it. “But you're not in_ _tune you know.”_

_“Right,” he sniffles, bending low over his guitar and going straight in to fix his high E string, which means he was aware of it too. But fixing it is another matter entirely and Paul watches as it takes a painfully long time for John to hear the imbalance, the flatness in the E compared to the E played on the in-tune B string just above it, and at first John tunes it lower, so it’s now a full half-step too low, and Paul winces and John cranks the knob the other way, too much, and now the high E is sharp, and Paul winces again, and John sits up and pushes his guitar to Paul._

_“You fuckin' do it then!”_

_“Gladly!”_

  _And Paul takes the thing and flips it so it sits in his left hand properly and John watches with impetuous eyes that remind Paul of the small children who play in the overgrown bomb craters the city hasn’t gotten around to filling in yet, except those kids are having fun and John isn’t, but the basic idea is the same: it’s a child’s impulse that guides them all. Paul doesn’t mind being the grown up for a moment, being the one to tune John’s guitar, being the one to take control. Because he can tune the guitar with his eyes closed, really, even left-handed, and it pisses John off but he also sort of admires it, Paul can tell, because his eyes get a bit squinty and he lowers his glasses to the end of his nose, his nostrils flaring just a bit as he breathes, and his jaw unclenches, and even though he mutters some kind of insult—Paul can’t hear it—it doesn’t matter, because he licks his lips and quirks his lips and Paul wants to kiss his lips but he doesn’t, he finds the perfect pitch instead and the string rings out, pure and true, in harmonic waves that match a curious vibration in his solar plexus, and his chest expands and fills the room and he suddenly likes that idea, of being a whole room that can contain John Lennon, with all his meanness and spite but all his beautiful bits too. Not because he wants to bottle him up for himself but because he wants to be alone with him, always, close and safe, and what’s safer than a pocket next to your heart where the pure tones of the music you make together take root and find nourishment to bloom and grow?_

_He hands John the guitar, and John takes it like it’s a holy relic. Then he looks down his nose at Paul, over the top rim of his glasses._

_“You know I love you still, don’t you?”_

_Paul smiles and blushes. “Yes, I know,” he says. “Now, can we keep playing?”_

John is smiling and Paul doesn’t want to stop. 

“What’s next.”

“Oh just you wait…”

_They share a microphone because, yes, they can hear each other better, and that's what they tell everyone when they cram into each other's space in the cavernous Studio 2, but that’s not the only reason and they hope nobody else can tell that it’s really because they just like to sing to each other. They sing to each other in the canteen during breaks, humming melodies with tea at their lips. They sing to each other over the tops of their cars as they get in to drive home, silent ocular symphonies filled with eyebrow-lift cadences and blinked staccatos. They sing to each other in those rare and blissful mornings when they find themselves able to luxuriate in closeness over breakfasts of coffee and toast and sausages. They sing to each other whenever and wherever they can._

_But here, in the glare of the studio lights, beneath the watchful eye of The Duke of Edinburgh himself, way up in his control room, it feels so much more intimate and scandalous to share a mic. They’ve been back in the UK a little less than a week after conquering the entire world via the CBS-TV Studio 50 stage, and the high is unstoppable, because it feels like they’ve made it where they always said they’d go _—_ _

_“Where is that?”_

_“The toppermost of the poppermost”_

__—bu_ t the only conquering that matters is in the battlefield of inches that lay between them, and it's conquering the urge to zero that distance and claim what’s rightfully theirs, which is to say: each other. And Paul isn't sure he can't make it through what has already been an achingly long recording session. His defenses are weak and the song they've been singing _ _—ten takes already _ _—is not making it any easier. But it'll be worth it to get John home after this, and then it won't matter who wins the war.____ _

_Paul smiles and John catches it, lifts an eyebrow—”What?”’—but doesn’t say a word, because they’re rolling._

_“Nothing,” Paul says with nothing but a smile and a shake of his head._

_“Take eleven,” their producer’s voice sounds in their ears, and John steps closer to the mic. He blinks, smiles from the corners of his eyes…_

_“If I fell in love with you…”_

_And Paul doesn’t have to look to know that John is singing to him. He doesn’t need to feel the warmth from John’s body as they angle together in front of the microphone. He doesn’t need to question why John had insisted that they share a mic in the first place; he’d been so adamant, and Paul had wondered why initially, but when he joins in on the higher harmony—always higher, Paul on top; even that is a little in-joke now, one that makes Paul’s knees weak and gives him butterflies as he stands there with the barest slip of a whisper between his body and the one he wants to play, fretless but with strings and notes that Paul knows how to charm just as easily as he does his Höfner—when he joins in he knows that the reason is so that they can sing to each other here, in the EMI Studio on Abbey Road in St. John’s Wood in private in front of everyone._

_He hears John’s voice and it seems like it goes the distance from his lips to Paul’s and then it slips behind his teeth and over his tongue and down his throat and lodges itself behind his ribcage, and when he sings back to John it’s with his own voice and pieces of John’s voice too, or at least his sentiment. John’s, deep and resonant, mahogany next to Paul’s maple, and wouldn’t that make a beautiful guitar? Mahogany for the back and sides, to hold the sound made by the maple fretboard, to multiply it, beautify it, reflect it into the world as the best version of itself. Just the same way John seems to be able to do with the words he sings, words he’s put in Paul’s mouth because he wrote them, which he asked Paul to sing alongside him, inches apart and deliriously untouchable…_

_“If I fell in love with you…”_

“Oh, I was coy wasn't I?" John smiles. " _If I fell_... there was no ifs, ands, or buts about it. I fell alright… arse over tea kettle, I did.” 

Paul feels tears in his eyes and he swipes at them and wonders when he got so old, but he knows the answer to that, so he shakes his head. “We left that session and—” 

“You’ve never driven faster,” John says. “We made it to mine in record time.” 

“Then it was up to the music room.” 

“No, the sunroom.” 

“Wherever it was, we barely made it," Paul smiles. "We nearly had it off in the foyer."

“Brutal,” John shakes his head. “But what a night…” 

John is sitting closer to him on the bed now, or Paul has moved closer to him, but they aren’t touching, because you can’t touch a figment of your imagination— 

_I’m sitting right here, Paul. Try me._

—but they’re close, and the ache is still in Paul’s chest but not as bad anymore. He rubs three fingers against his clavicle and sucks in a breath that cracks his chest on the inhale and shakes as he releases it.

“Remember your birthday?” John asks.

“Which one?”

“Twenty-one…”

And Paul does, because you don’t forget the night your best friend starts a fight in your Aunty’s back garden because he can’t stand being called queer, but anyway Paul can’t really remember how that whole thing started only that it was a terribly John thing to do, to lay into Bob Wooler like that, because _John, your mouth was always writing cheques the rest of you couldn’t cash_ — 

_You stood up for me a lot… I owe you one._

_You owe me_ _more_ _than one._

_I’ll settle up when you get here…_

Paul nods at John’s earlier question but also at the unspoken agreement— _when you get here_ implies _he will get there_ _someday_ , and althought he has no intention of hastening the journey, man-oh-man, now he knows he’s got something to look forward to, seeing him again, and—

_I thought you didn’t believe I was here? So why would you believe a word I said?_

Paul smiles at that. “What’s this about my birthday?”

John shakes remembrance into his head. “Do you remember what I bought for you…?”

_“Open it,” John says, his voice softening the hard darkness of the London street._

_Paul is mad, madder than he probably ought to be, because it’s been less than forty-eight hours since John beat the shit out of their friend for suggesting that John and Brian had had an affair, and Paul still doesn’t know how to take that. Because the truth of the matter is that it’s_ _him_ _John is sleeping with. Regularly. Paul and John have had each other in just about every way, and if Paul has his way they’ll knock off soon and find a place to celebrate, here in the capital, just the two of them, the way he wants to, the way he’s wanted to since his birthday party. But if John has his way Paul suspects he won’t want to come anywhere near him anyway, because an outburst like that—he was ready to kill Bob, Paul just knows it—doesn’t come from nowhere. And for the first time since this whole thing started way back… how long ago was it? For the first time, Paul feels ashamed of what they’re doing._

_He holds the box in his hands. Tied with a little white ribbon, it’s delicate and beautiful, and he knows John didn’t wrap it, that this is Cynthia’s work, which takes away a little bit of the romance, because maybe this is a gift from the Lennons, not a gift from John. And suddenly he doesn’t want to open it at all._

_“Just open it, Paul,” John urges. “Please.”_

_It’s the “Please” that does it, the soft way the word cracks as John speaks it, and Paul relents. He rolls his eyes and slips a finger beneath the satin ribbon and opens the lid, and there’s tissue paper on top, and that’s the first time that Paul realizes that this is a box you get at a jewellery store. This is jewellery. And as his fingers pull the paper and reveal what’s inside—a gold bracelet, ‘PAUL’ inscribed on the nameplate—he feels his heart in his throat._

_“You know, in case you get hit by a tram and suffer amnesia and forget who you are,” John quips._

_Paul lifts the heavy thing out of the box and turns it over in his hands, watching it catch the glint of the street light. On the back side of the nameplate sees another inscription, smaller this time, but still readable:_

_“I Fell,” Paul says, looks up, confused. “You fell?”_

_“In love with you.”_

_It's a lyric, Paul recognizes, from a song John has been tooling with for a while but hasn't committed to, and that's something to think about, isn't it? which is what Paul does as he takes him in, like he’s seeing him for the first time. Because it is the first time John has said it in this way—like this, and there are honest-to-god hearts in his eyes and Cupid’s bow and arrows and all that shit flying around his head… but not really because that’s cliche and that’s not John at all—and Paul doesn’t know what to think, so he holds the bracelet out to John, who helps to fasten the bracelet with clumsy fingers. It takes a full minute for John to negotiate the clasp to open it, and then another minute to renegotiate it closed, once the bracelet is wrapped around Paul’s wrist._

_But Paul doesn’t mind the wait; he relishes the closeness, the warmth, the electricity. Before he can pull away, he grasps John’s hand, palm to palm, and threads his fingers between the older man’s. He feels every callous, growing into his fingertips like an extra enabling appendage, rough and necessary for the job he's asked them to do. The swirls and whorls in his skin are like a map, and Paul can feel each ridge, following it like it will lead him to Canaan… but then he’s already landed on that promise—he’s holding it right now—and so he just squeezes John’s hand in spite of the wounds on his knuckles, the ones put there in a fit of defensive rage two nights before._

_“Fuck, Paul!” John protests, but doesn’t pull away._

_“You bought this for me?”_

_“Happy Birthday.”_

_Paul is so touched. He looks at the bracelet, glimmering in the light. “For your twenty-first, I got you a hamburger!”_

_“I know,” John says. “But then you fucked me senseless in our hotel room so I figured it evened out.”_

_Paul chuckles. “So does this mean you’re going to fuck me senseless in our hotel room?"_

_John shuffles his feet as he laughs, and then he shakes his head. “Fuck, Paul, it wasn’t about me and Brian. You hafta know that. There is no me and Brian. It’s about you and me. In my head, anyway, that’s what I heard. And he was trying so hard to make that sound ugly. I couldn’t let him do that. Not on your birthday.”_

_Paul nods, because it make a little bit of sense, in a Lennon sort of way._

_"I didn't mean to ruin yer birthday."_

_"You didn't."_

_"I did. And I'm sorry. And I do love you."_

_Paul shakes his head, lifts his hands. The golden bracelet is cold against his skin, shockingly cold, but the longer it sits against his skin the warmer it becomes and John’s got the blood flowing to all of Paul’s extremities now. He sighs and adjusts the tie that John is still wearing, inexplicably. "John Lennon... what am I gonna do with yeh?"_

_John’s eyes twinkle a bit. "I've got a few ideas."_

_Paul laughs like he’s drunk and a bit giddy and he grips John’s hands tightly in his own. They’re both utterly legless but Paul has to kiss him or he’ll explode, so with their hands entwined he closes the gap and kisses him against the wall, soft and full._

_“Take me home?” Paul asks against John's mouth._

_“Gladly."_

Paul can’t believe that was twenty-one years ago. He shakes his head. “It feels like yesterday.”

“I know,” John says, furrowing his brow because he can tell where this is going. “Don’t get maudlin…”

“Okay,” Paul whispers, right before he gets maudlin, and feels tears on his cheeks again. “I just don’t know how to go on without you, John.”

“How did you go on without yer mum?”

“That was different.”

“Not so much,” John says. “You’ve just got to carry on. You’ve got so much left ahead of you that you haven’t done yet.”

“But _how long_?” The thought fills Paul with dread and he thinks John sees it in his face because John starts to laugh, but Paul just shakes his head. “How long do I have to go before I see you again?”

“You can see me anytime you’d like, Macca,” John says. “I’ll be here.”

“No but _really_. When will I really see you again?”

John just rolls his eyes a little. “Soon enough,” he says, pausing, thinking it over, and Paul can see the way he decides it’s not true, what he said, because John’s eyes seem to falter a little, the hardness there disappears, and he wavers. “No. Not soon enough. Not by a long shot.”

Paul never needed to hear that John loved him to know that John loved him and he doesn’t need to hear it now, but in that moment, with the slightest tilt of his head, a pause in his speech, a wrenching sadness that steals the light from his eyes, John has said more than he ever needed to.

“I miss you so much.” It sounds pathetic when Paul says it, like he’s a child again, but that’s how he feels, and anyway, it’s John; he’ll understand. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

He wants to _hold him_ , so badly, but it’s impossible and they both know it, so they settle for this—John puts his hand on Paul’s and Paul feels a warmth diffuse out over his fingers, like reaching toward a flame and touching the outer edge of the heat it’s giving off. It’s not like in the movies or on TV, Paul reasons; _this_ is something else Hollywood gets wrong. Because it’s not spectrally cold, there’s no _lack_ of warmth, there’s an _abundance_ of it, that touch from beyond. It’s safe. It’s golden. 

He should know that by now, but it’s always such a nice surprise.

“Well,” John’s voice cracks, and Paul can tell he's deliberately trying to make light. “I’m off to haunt an old library. Then I’m meeting up for a game of snooker with the great Jeanne d’Arc. Heaven’s a trip, man.”

“I bet,” Paul sniffles. “John? You’ll come back?”

“Don’t I always?”

Paul wants to know if John visits Cynthia, or Julian, or Yoko and Sean like he’s doing right now, but he doesn’t want to ask it out loud and— 

_What, you think you’re special or something?_

_Well as a matter of fact—_

_No, you are. You always were. My Macca…_

Paul falls asleep and when he wakes up he’s not overly sad, though there’s an ache where his heart sits beating against his breastbone and he remembers all too well what put it there, and he still doesn’t quite believe but he’s not a skeptic either. Like so much of his experience with John, it’s undefined, whatever this is; he won’t try to label it. 

He’d fail anyway.

Best to just take it as it comes, and enjoy it while it lasts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter is based on a number of things. First off, the suggestions of waveofahand, who first told me about the fan theory involving Paul's bracelet being not just a gift from John on Paul's 21st but also having been engraved with "If I Fell" on the backside. No proof for this but it's a nice little headcanon that I absolutely subscribe to.
> 
> Secondly, the suggestion that I focus this chapter on flashbacks (also courtesy waveofahand!) 
> 
> Thirdly... a dream I had on the night George Harrison died. A friend of mine--a very funny, bright, young man, who was handsome and kind and a talented drummer in our school band--had been very seriously injured in a car accident at the end of October, 2001. He died two weeks later, in mid-November. He was the first young person I'd known who had died. I didn't get to go to the funeral because the emotionally-stunted and abusive person I was dating at the time was so jealous of my affection for my deceased friend that he punched a few walls in the school hallway in his anger and in staying to calm him down I missed my ride to the church. So I was still grieving the loss deeply and struggling to find closure at the end of November when I had a dream that John and George came to talk to me. In the dream, they were sitting and playing guitars in the basement storage room just around the corner from where my teenage bedroom was. George had his head down; he looked sad, but I didn't know it was him at first. John was sitting there strumming and looking right at me. They were both wearing black turtlenecks, Help!/Rubber Soul-era style. John looked up at me as he strummed and said "Don't worry about [my friend's name]; we needed a drummer up here anyway." And then both he and George faded away. I woke up the next morning to my alarm clock radio breaking the news that George Harrison had died. I'll never forget that for as long as I live. 
> 
> I don't know that I believe in ghosts or that John Lennon and George Harrison really visited me or anything like that. But the _possibility_ exists, I suppose, and anyway I can't put into words how much of a comfort that dream was. That feeling is what this chapter was meant to capture.

**Author's Note:**

> All chapter titles and the title of the story taken from the beautiful Sufjan Stevens song "John My Beloved"


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